We Expose Serious Discrepancies in SAHRC Hospital Overcrowding Data

ActionSA Health and Wellness Spokesperson in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature Emma More, has officially responded to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), formally expressing strong disagreement with the Commission’s recent explanations regarding non-national public healthcare utilisation.

Following the SAHRC’s Imbizo on 25 May 2026, where the Commission boldly claimed there is no evidence linking hospital overcrowding to foreign nationals, MPL More requested the empirical data supporting this stance. The SAHRC’s written response, dated 04 June 2026, contains glaring factual inaccuracies, mathematical impossibilities, and attempts to retroactively alter the narrative presented to the public.

SAHRC’s written clarification claims that their Imbizo pronouncements were strictly referring to a localised 2022 investigation in Limpopo. However, this contradicts the Imbizo itself, where the speaker used the Limpopo data to make a sweeping, definitive declaration about the entirety of South Africa.

Such blanket statements dismiss the severe capacity shortages and daily realities experienced by healthcare workers in highly populated provinces like Gauteng.

Furthermore, an analysis of the SAHRC’s own provided data (“Annexure A”) reveals severe contradictions:

1. The Commission’s letter claimed that Mokopane Hospital admitted 2,080 patients between June and August 2022, of which only 114 (5.5%) were non-nationals.
2. However, the SAHRC’s own data ledger contradicts this, showing 233 foreign nationals admitted in June 2022 alone, and another 333 in July 2022.
3. While the SAHRC implies non-national admissions are “very low,” their data shows that at Messina Hospital (February to July 2022), 2,558 foreign nationals were admitted compared to only 1,135 South Africans.

The SAHRC also relied on highly flawed and misapplied source material to justify its stance, including:

• A 2015 University of Cape Town Law Thesis, representing Western Cape data from over a decade ago, which is entirely irrelevant to the current service delivery strains in Gauteng.
• A 2013 survey (Abaerei et al., 2017) that explicitly excludes hospital admissions data and attributes public facility avoidance to the “high volume of patients in these places” supporting the argument of systemic overcrowding.
• A 2025 localised qualitative study (Thulo et al.) that mapped the personal experiences of only 15 migrants in primary care clinics, which cannot be used to quantify provincial hospital bed capacity.

Despite these fundamental disagreements, MPL More has welcomed the SAHRC’s invitation to conduct joint monitoring of hospitals and healthcare facilities in Gauteng under section 114(2)(b) of the Constitution.

However, to ensure that policy discourse is guided by accurate facts and not selective data, MPL More has requested that a formal preliminary meeting be scheduled between ActionSA GPL and the SAHRC prior to any joint oversight visits.

This meeting is essential to clarify the data discrepancies and establish a clear, transparent, and objective auditing methodology for the upcoming facility inspections.

ActionSA Nobuhle Mthembu (Speaker of Johannesburg) Rising Star: Currently serves as the Speaker of the Johannesburg Council, one of the most powerful legislative positions in the country’s economic hub. Focus: Known for a strict “Rule of Law” approach to council sittings and managing the volatile multi-party environment in Jo’burg. Athol Trollip (National Chairperson)