Honourable Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsolaedi  

Traditional leaders in the room, vho Makhadzi

Colleagues from WHO, BUSA and SANAC civil society Forum

All Important stakeholders in the room today  

Workers and Comrades

Greetings from COSATU

We wish to start by extending our appreciation for the invitation to participate in this engagement and the recognition of the critical role played by organised labour in addressing and advancing issues of health in our country.

Comrades and colleagues, as we gather here today, we do so on behalf of more than 1.4 million workers that we organise across different sectors of our economy, including women who have been or might be affected by cervical cancer if we don’t do this right.

Honourable Minister, it is a pity that women continue to die of cervical cancer while we know fully well it is preventable and treatable if diagnosed and caught early. Thirty-two years into this democracy, it is an indictment on government that 5 800 women die of cervical cancer each year, particularly black women, more than any other race, making it the leading cause of cancer related deaths among women in this country.

This is a reflection of inequalities linked to awareness and access to early cancer detection and treatment between population groups. We know it is preventable and highly treatable if caught early. All it takes is a pap smear to detect it from its early stages; however women continue to die due to lack of knowledge and inequalities within the healthcare system.

This unfortunate reality shows how critical this framework is because it will address the very basics, such as lack of awareness and much needed education amongst the poor, the vulnerable and the working class, including women in rural areas who often experience various social and economic challenges in accessing healthcare.

If more women, such as cleaners, domestic workers, security officers, farmworkers and all other vulnerable groups including our informal workers like Mama Dolly who sells fruits on the side of the road, were aware of cervical cancer screening and prevention services, this could drastically reduce the amount of cervical cancer related deaths amongst women, and workers in particular. If every woman knew that all it takes is a few minutes of discomfort, literally thousands of lives would be saved; this is the kind of advocacy we are willing to support.

The sustained rollout of HPV vaccination is therefore important to protect adolescent girls from infection with the HPV virus. It becomes quite critical to ensure that education and awareness include dispelling the myths formed during the Covid19 pandemic, when a lot of misinformation was spread about vaccines. This fearmongering resulted in many people becoming reluctant to getting vaccinated, so we might be confronted with that same reluctance from parents not wanting their children to be vaccinated for HPV.

The mothers of these children we want to target are workers, and we as COSATU have access to workers. We have the power of mobilisation; we have the power to roll out mass education. We know where to find workers, Minister, we don’t have to go looking for them. For this reason, COSATU is fully committed to efforts that ensure that workers play their role in the vaccination of their children.

And for those who have not been lucky enough to be vaccinated, it is crucial for government to invest in screening services, and that such services are available and can be easily accessible at all healthcare facilities.  

Government must ensure that those diagnosed with cervical cancer should have access to treatment as early as possible, as opposed to what we have recently seen, where health facilities have long waiting lists for treatment, leaving the disease to progress and patients eventually dying while waiting in line for treatment. Government must demolish these barriers and health systems failures that send women to their graves unnecessarily. If we don’t make treatment available, the result will be loss of breadwinners, women workers left incapacitated, their children left without mothers, leading to an increase in child-headed households with an overreliance on government support for their basic survival, especially considering that South Africa has a high number of single-women headed households. So, when women die Minister, families and children are left destitute.

We know as a government you are very good with developing strategies and frameworks, as a country we have one of the best policies and strategies in the world, but we are less than effective when it comes to implementation.

As COSATU our position is clear; we want to see action on the ground Minister. We want to see a massive vaccination rollout in schools, even in the most rural of areas.  We want to see backlogs cleared at public facilities, we want to see more women accessing treatment and more women living longer, healthier lives and not dying prematurely because of health system failures.

Cosatu remains committed to working together with the department of health to raise awareness and support educational campaigns across all our sectors and workplaces, and to continue granting the Department of Health access to workers for health and screening services when we host big union meetings in order to bridge the healthcare service delivery gap. Minister, we urge you to consider extending the Cheka Impilo wellness of package to also include pap smear as a standard feature.

And on this World Cancer Day, as organised labour we stand in solidarity with the thousands of women fighting cervical cancer in South Africa today. We stand in solidarity with women workers who are affected by cervical cancer one way or the other. We remain committed to collaboration with all key stakeholders to advance the interests of workers and to support this coordinated approach to implementation. Leave no worker behind, together we can defeat cervical cancer.

Thank you very much. Amandla!!!!