MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Operation Dudula is responsible for the death of Grace Banda's baby and we should be enraged

A few weeks ago, Grace Banda, a Malawian national, took her sick baby to the Alexandra Community Health Centre to receive the urgent treatment that the child desperately needed.

Banda was turned away from the clinic by members of Operation Dudula, who demanded that she produce a South African national identity document in order to access healthcare services.

Banda could not produce this document because she is not a South African national. She was forced to return home with the sick child, who later died. The child was only one year old.

Over the past few months, members of Operation Dudula, a fascist organisation that targets vulnerable and helpless working-class foreign nationals in townships and the inner city, has been turning away foreign nationals from clinics and hospitals across Gauteng and other provinces.

An investigation by GroundUp, published in July this year, shows the horrors that immigrant mothers are forced to endure by the actions of Operation Dudula members, who not only dehumanise them, but also put their infants' lives at risk by denying them entry to healthcare facilities to access critical vaccines.

Despite calls by the Department of Health and other organisations for members of Operation Dudula to cease their criminal behaviour, it has continued its reign of terror against some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

It must be stated that the actions of Operation Dudula, which it masks as patriotism and the defence of South Africa's public services, are nothing more than criminality. Denying people access to healthcare services, whether they are documented or not, is illegal. Section 27(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (Act No 108 of 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. This was emphasised in a 2023 ruling in the Gauteng High Court that pregnant and lactating women and young children should be granted free health care services regardless of their nationality.

Thus, by turning away migrants, documented or not, and especially mothers and children, from public clinics and hospitals, membersof Operation Dudula are committing a crime.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in Ekurhuleni has rightly opened a case against members of Operation Dudula in the matter of the Banda baby. But it is not the first organisation to demand legal action against the organisation.

In June 2025, the Gauteng Local Division of the High Court, Johannesburg heard an application instituted by Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, the South African Informal Traders Forum, the Inner-City Federation and Abahlali BaseMjondolo seeking relief against Operation Dudula and certain of its office-bearers in respect of ongoing xenophobic speech and conduct and against the Government of the Republic of South Africa and more specifically the Ministers of Police, Home Affairs, Justice and Constitutional Development, Health, Basic Education, as well as the Gauteng MECs for Health and Education, for failing to discharge their duties in relation to Operation Dudulas unlawful conduct.

Frustratingly, judgment was reserved in the case, allowing for Operation Dudula to continue with its illegal and dangerous campaign.

But it is not only the inertia of the legal system to hold Operation Dudula accountable for its criminality that has emboldened it.

The South African government, both at national and provincial level, has failed in its duty to protect the rightsof those on the receiving end of Operation Dudula's criminality.

In 2023, the Gauteng Department of Health applied for an urgent court interdict against Operation Dudula. Subsequently, the Court order preventing disruption to free access to the hospital was granted. However, there has been a gross failure in implementing this order.

The government has been more focused on reasoning with the organisation than on punishing its crimes. This was evidenced in a written reply to parliament by the Minister of Health, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, in which he stated: "Operation Dudula leadership was informed that there are other ways of addressing their allegations against the hospital management.

Having visited the Kalafong Hospital and assisting the Gauteng Provincial Department of Health and subsequently meeting with Operation Dudula leadership, was done as an attempt to open the lines of communication so that Operation Dudula is free to talk to us about specific matters they might have".

This laissez-faire approach to Operation Dudula has emboldened it. It is the reason that more than two years since the Court order was granted, the organisation continues with its criminal action that cost the life of Banda's baby.

No mother should have to watch their one-year-old child die the way Grace Banda was forced to. Whether she is documented or not, her child had the right to get the treatment that was so desperately needed. That child deserved to live.

It is only a barbaric society that believes that a child should die because their mother is an immigrant, even an undocumented one. We cannot, if we are humane people, defend the actions of an organisation that is causing the deaths of innocent babies.

As Black people, as women, it should be unconscionable to us that in our country, those who look like us should be treated with such inhumanity.

It is for this reason that I support the correct decision by the EFF in Ekurhuleni to open a criminal case against Operation Dudula. I hope that the EFF will mobilise a strong legal team to fight this case, and that it will give the public an opportunity to contribute, financially and otherwise, to this cause.

It is about time that we South Africans who are opposed to Operation Dudula and similar organisations put our resources, financial and otherwise, to the struggle for reclaiming the humanity of South Africa.

There is nothing "patriotic" about refusing access to healthcare for foreign nationals - documented or not. To argue otherwise is to affirm the dangerous and regressive idea that the lives of foreign nationals, of Black people, are cheap.

It is to assert that those forced by circumstances to flee their home countries are unworthy of protection - that their humanity is insignificant. To descend to this kind of thinking, regardless of whatever concerns may exist about the immigration question in our country, is to be devoid of humanness.

Malaika is a geographer (with expertise in urban geography and water resource governance) and researcher at the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation. She is a PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.