NOBEL PRIZE NOMINATION “DEFIES COMPREHENSION”, SAYS HEART SURGEON
A South African heart surgeon, Dr Wilhelm Lichtenberg, has come out with guns blazing following the Government’s nomination of the Cuban Medical Brigade for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.“ The nomination defies any form of sober comprehension,” says Dr Lichtenberg, a Cardiothoracic Surgeon based in Goodwood, Cape Town.” The South African Red Cross, the Red Crescent and Doctors Without Borders have for decades done far, far more under far more challenging and dangerous conditions than the Cuban doctors.
The motives are more than merely suspect and clearly bear close scrutiny.” Dr Lichtenberg, also known as the “singing surgeon”, is one of the performers in a touching song, Healthcare Heroes, in honour or the South African healthcare workers which went viral earlier this year. Announcing the nomination in February, President Cyril Ramaphosa said he wished to recognise the “selfless and unwavering assistance” of the government and people of Cuba. “True to its history, a small island nation has demonstrated solidarity with the hardest-hit countries and sent more than 3 700 Cubans throughout the world to assist in the fight against COVID-19,” he said. Dr Lichtenberg is not impressed.
He says whilst the Cuban contribution must clearly be recognised and gratitude extended accordingly, he cannot help but wonder why it was necessary to bring them to South Africa in the first place. “Why bring a brigade of foreign healthcare workers into the country, at a monstrous cost to the taxpayer, rather than equip our own perfectly competent, dedicated and extremely hardworking healthcare workers to do the same job as effectively, if not better? What do these people offer which we don’t have in SA? Clearly there must be a political motive behind this.” He says if they truly are a “band of Samaritans”, it begs the question why they have not been deployed to other areas of the world where the need is far greater.
“When Italy and the UK were on their knees, there was no sign of them. It doesn’t require a rocket scientist to figure out why.” How did the song in honour of our healthcare workers come about? “The project was the product of a collaboration between my colleague Martin Young, who wrote the lyrics, and my dear friend Riaan Steyn, whose musical genius is behind the melody and the arrangement.” Try running around trussed up like a Christmas turkey in a claustrophobic outfit for 12 hours at a time, surrounded by sick and dying people. He says in his thirty-odd years as a practising doctor, barely a day has gone by where his respect and admiration for healthcare workers has not been renewed over and over again. “With all due credit and respect to all healthcare workers, including doctors, paramedics, physiotherapists, pharmacists and others, the motivation for the song was specifically the nurses, with whom I work closely and whom I regard as my colleagues. I learn from them every single day. “Think about one single profession you will need somewhere during your life on earth. You could go through life without ever needing the services of a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, a banker, a clergyman. But somewhere, someday, you will need a nurse, especially at the beginning and the end of your life.”
He is at pains to point out that the nurses do this selfless work for a ridiculously small salary and little or no recognition. “Nowhere was that more blatantly obvious than during this pandemic. Try running around trussed up like a Christmas turkey in a claustrophobic outfit for 12 hours at a time, surrounded by sick and dying people, all the while endangering your own life and potentially the lives of those you love when you do eventually get home, debilitating exhausted (mentally, physically, emotionally), dehydrated and hungry. And tomorrow you return to do it all over again. And you expect nothing in return. It’s just what you do.” And that, says the man who regularly performs open heart and major lung operations – ably assisted by these healthcare heroes – is why the Goverment’s ill-fated decision to bypass South Africa’s healthcare workers is even more confounding and frustrating.