Dear Editor
The DA has written to the Acting Minister of Police, Prof Firoz Cachalia, to request that the South African Police Service (SAPS) deploys public order policing to uphold the rule of law and protect individuals’ constitutional rights to access to healthcare properties where Operarion Dudula is blocking access.
The DA utterly condemns Operation Dudula and March on March’s despicable hindering and intimidation of foreign nationals seeking health care in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
We call on the provincial departments of health and SAPS to ensure that all individuals seeking health care are protected from xenophobic attacks and intimidation allegedly perpetrated by members of these organisations.
We have also submitted parliamentary questions to determine to what extent the Department of Health is failing to protect patients from exercising this vital constitutional right.
Section 27 of the Constitution guarantees each and every individual’s right to access health care services, including reproductive health care and emergency medical treatment.
The Constitution does not exclude individuals from this human right based on their nationality or country of origin.
While South Africa’s public health sector indeed faces vast constraints and challenges – many of them due to corruption and mismanagement – this is not the fault of desperate foreign nationals seeking medical care. The medical care of foreign nationals inside South Africa is absolutely essential to stop communicable diseases. If we stop treating any person with communicable diseases, vast outbreaks will follow which will directly affect South Africans too.
Instead of blaming foreign nationals, Operation Dudula and their xenophobic cronies would do better by holding failing government officials to account, rather than intimidating the most vulnerable.
Perhaps Operation Dudula could ask the Gauteng Premier, Panyaza Lesufi, and his Health MEC, Nomantu Nkomo-Ralehoko, why they’re still failing to provide radiation therapy to cancer patients despite a court order? Or they could insist that corrupt companies that are robbing the public health sector blind be blacklisted and banned from doing business with provincial health departments and hospitals and clinics. They could insist that critical vacancies be filled, dangerous health facility infrastructure be fixed and maintained, or that each patient have a clean bed and the necessary medication while they recuperate.
Instead, Operation Dudula, Action SA, March on March, and their cowardly ilk do none of these things, because it’s easier to blame vulnerable foreign nationals than actually try and clean the mess in their own backyard and hold their own corrupt countrymen to account.
Health care is a right that belongs to us all, no matter where we come from – and stopping communicable diseases demands that every sick person is treated in public health facilities.
Regards
Michéle Clarke MP
DA Spokesperson on Health