South Africa – cruelty beyond measure

The Republic of South Africa (RSA) has become a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream for Black African foreigners. Practically, not a good place to live. For years the RSA has offered fellow Black people from across the continent security and friendship and did not ask anything in return. That is the RSA of the past, never to return. South African citizens unhappy with the growing socioeconomic inequalities in the country have turned on Black foreigners. We have seen the harassment of Black foreigners in public hospitals. Not a good sight by any measure. Only South Africans can celebrate that.  

The cruelty being displayed by vigilante groups and individuals against foreign nationals in South Africa is wrong, and whenever we see it, we must never be silent; no sane person would see justice in the deliberate withdrawal of life-saving treatment to another human being just because of their legal status in South Africa. We must be clear that dehumanizing vulnerable foreigners is cowardice not strength, it marks the depths of moral depravity; it is cruel and not supported by any provision within the human conscience and the constitution of the RSA.

Let us not normalise the abnormal; cruelty must not be our default, it cannot be legitimised as a demonstration against an inadequate public healthcare system that requires urgent reforms, but it must be exposed for the hate that it really is.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity. RSA is a thriving democracy, those who object to Black foreigners accessing public healthcare facilities can put their point across without the need to be cruel. There are many opportunities, including via elected legislators.

Evil begins when vigilante groups, activists, and hate-filled communities start treating foreign nationals as objects. By dehumanising Black foreigners, South Africans hope to remove the burden of moral responsibility that comes with the respect of other humans.

When organised groups and communities are allowed to run riot, hunt down, and blockade access to hospitals for foreigners, invade hospitals and demand clinicians to discharge medically unfit patients because they are foreigners, there is something fundamentally wrong with their psyching. If the South African public does not act against these crackpot and fools harassing patients in public hospitals, it will lose credibility worldwide.

In July 2025, the South African government published a memo reminding the public that it was illegal to bar anyone from accessing and receiving healthcare from public institutions. The memo pointed out that Section 27(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, clearly provides that: “Everyone has the right to have access to healthcare services”. This right is not subject to an individual’s nationality or immigration status.

What we are witnessing is the exploitation of a legitimate problem of public health funding by craven and cruel people who have chosen to use that to spew hate against certain communities. Is there tangible data that undocumented foreigners are causing the backlog of hospital appointments, blocking beds that should otherwise be occupied by South Africans?

No right-minded person questions the need for healthcare reforms to ensure improved public healthcare provision; it is the dehumanizing methods being employed that leave us wondering what the long-term objectives of the protesters are. Addressing legitimate issues of disproportionate healthcare provision is one thing, being bigoted is another.

While these groups are a concern, the main worry is the silence of good South Africans. Those who are quiet today because the target and victim of cruelty are foreigners will see themselves facing the same fate one day either because they are unemployed or a certain ethnic group and not the other or one race and not another.

It is perfectly possible to explain the underwhelming RSA socioeconomic indicators without brutalising Black immigrants, but they are a soft target and the best source of distraction for opportunists, so everyone would circle around them, depict them as the main source of the problem while also parroting their removal as the only solution.

Illegal migration is a complex problem that needs addressing with sensitivity. We accept that increased migration does impact healthcare service provision in certain areas of the country, but to generalise the systemic public healthcare provision inefficiencies to Black migrants is disingenuous. This is a longstanding problem of the apartheid legacy.

Until there are changes to the RSA constitution, foreigners, including the undocumented, are eligible for free medical treatment from public health institutions. The assumption that Black foreign nationals are without rights to public health service and the illusion that their abusive treatment by local vigilante groups has no moral significance is a serious indictment to South African citizens’ morality. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.