In 2000, journalist Khadjia Magardie from the South African newspaper Mail &
Guardian reported that a South African nurse chased an Angolan refugee seeking
immunization of her child away from a Mpumalanga clinic, shouting that “‘she, a
foreigner, was eating South African medicines.’”1 Medicine and medical care are
scarce resources and fourteen years later, in the IOL news, journalist Zelda Venter
reported that a 27 year-old Ethiopian man was refused dialysis at the Helen Joseph
Hospital in Johannesburg and died soon after because as non-South African citizen,
he did not qualify for an organ transplant. This story, unfortunately, is not unique.
The on-line version attracted posts echoing the same sentiments that the nurse
expressed a generation earlier. One person commented: ‘Ethiopian president should
take note of this. Don’t send your sick here to be treated, our own people need it
more.’ Another person posted: ‘So now we must treat the whole damn world for
free????’2
Although these articles are fourteen years apart, they highlight the
ongoing tension between native South Africans and foreign nationals regarding
access to healthcare. The 1996 South African Constitution, Section 27, states that
‘everyone has the right to have access to health care services,’3
yet there is a dearth
of information on how refugees, migrants and other non-citizens exercise this right to
healthcare in South Africa. (The term refugee refers to someone lawfully present in
South Africa who is fleeing political or social persecution in his/her home country.
The South African nomenclature is, however, to call most migrants ‘refugees’
whether they have achieved this status or not. People seeking refugee status apply for
asylum seeker permits that can be renewed varies times before an actual status
determination is made by the Department of Home Affairs.) How South Africans
negotiate their socio-economic rights, and access to healthcare in particular, in the
post-apartheid era has been adjudicated in the courts resulting in precedents such as
giving mothers and new-born children with HIV free anti-retroviral medications.