Twelve military doctors were charged after failing to go to the Eastern Cape to help with the Covid-19 effort there, but they argue their WhatsApp deployment didn’t cut it in the first place.
Late on the first Friday of July, a list of names, rank and force numbers of 75 medical personnel deployed to the Eastern Cape was posted on a WhatsApp group they were on. Those on the list received follow-up phone calls to inform them that they were to report to the Waterkloof Air Force Base that Sunday so that they could go to the Eastern Cape where they would help the province in its Covid-19 efforts for the following eight weeks.
“A social media group cannot be used to give commands or orders in the military,” Plaatjies said. “There should have been the publication of a deployment order, a deployment list, a pre-deployment briefing, and a warning order to put people on standby to know that they’re going to be deployed, but there was no such. There was no date on which they were going to depart, or duration of how long they were going to be there. None of them could make a bone of what this entailed.
“It’s an indictment when the military starts to use WhatsApp groups to communicate with personnel on the ground,” he said. Plaatjies said it can take up to a week for members of the military to clear out of their unit.
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