Suspension of Gems principal officer won’t disrupt services, minister says

Public service & administration minister Mzamo Buthelezi has expressed confidence in the management of the Government Employees Medical Scheme (Gems), saying the precautionary suspension of its principal officer should not affect its day-to-day operations.

Gems is the largest medical scheme available to public servants and their families. It provides cover to about 2.4-million beneficiaries, including teachers, nurses and office workers.

Its board of trustees placed principal officer Stan Moloabi on precautionary suspension last week pending an internal investigation.

“It shouldn’t be an issue that the principal officer is not there because [Gems] is led by a collective … a team of executives,” Buthelezi said in an interview with Business Day.

Gems hasn’t publicly disclosed any details about why the board of trustees acted against Moloabi. The minister said he was not privy to the events that prompted the board’s action.

Buthelezi criticised Gems’ decision earlier this year to cut benefits in order to reduce claims expenditure, saying the scheme should instead be doing more to combat fraud, waste and abuse.

“I have actually appealed to them [to] put systems in place to make sure they close all these leakages in the system,” he said on the sidelines of a two-day symposium hosted by Gems in Cape Town.

Earlier in the day he appealed to Gems members not to participate in fraud. “Your membership credentials are not to be shared. Never collude with [healthcare] providers, and do not allow yourselves to be used to steal from your own scheme,” he said in a speech to symposium participants.

“Every rand lost through fraud and abuse, inflated bidding or a service never rendered is a resource diverted from a nurse, a teacher, a police officer and their families who legitimately depend on the scheme. It is theft from the public purse,” he said.

The government was committed to providing public servants and their families with affordable, quality healthcare, he said, adding: “We recognise the critical role that Gems continues to play in protecting the health and wellbeing of those who serve our country.”

Acting principal officer Vuyo Gqola said Gems had grown by more than 20% over the past five years, attracting an additional 415,000 beneficiaries. The majority (58%) of its beneficiaries lived outside South Africa’s major metropolitan areas and accounted for R35.9bn of the schemes’ total healthcare expenditure of R66.8bn last year, she said.

Gems faced a host of cost pressures, including increased utilisation, an ageing risk pool, the escalating cost of new technologies, and a growing burden of disease, she said. For example, the prevalence of depression had risen from 4.6% of beneficiaries in 2019 to 5.6% in 2025, she said. Claims expenditure on depression almost tripled over the period, rising from R923.9m in 2019 to R2.75bn in 2025.

Gems had introduced several programmes that had successfully cut expenditure without compromising care, she said, citing its palliative care programme for terminally ill patients.