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If you are a citizen of any country in Sub-Saharan Africa visiting or living in South Africa, you take your life in your own hands whenever you walk out of your house, apartment, or even hotel.
Worse still, if you visit a facility such as a public hospital. This is because to a gang of local militias known as Dudula Operation, you are an unwanted immigrant in the land of the late Nelson Mandela.
Members of this Dudula gang led by one of its founders who is known as Zandile Dabula have been going door to door, hospital to hospital kicking out black people who are not South African citizens from their houses, and even from their hospital beds.
According to one report that appeared in the BBC, members of this gang have been pulling people out of hospital queues and demanding for identification cards. Anyone who is black and a non-citizen of South Africa is forced to leave, sometimes violently.
The gang members claim that black people from other African countries are finishing up their medicines, and using their health facilities for free. They want mass deportations of black people from their country.
According to Dabula, the continued stay in the country by other Africans and their use of public facilities such as health centres is one of the reasons why public hospitals have long queues.
The gang also claims that other Africans who are in South Africa are the reasons why their children have become addicted to drugs such as cocaine and crystal meth.
“To tell you the truth, I hate [African] foreigners. How I wish they could just pack and go and leave our country,” a woman known as Dimakatso Makoena told the BBC in a previous interview. She blames Africans who moved to the country from Sub-Saharan countries for her son’s addiction to crystal meth.
“He started smoking drugs when he was 14 years old,” she says, explaining how her son often goes out to steal things to feed his habit. One day he had tried to take some power cables to sell when he got electrocuted and burned.”
In an interview with the BBC, Dudula’s leader Dabula had first claimed that she and her gang are chasing illegal Africans from their country. But when she was challenged that many of her gang’s victims were legal immigrants, she claimed that regardless, ‘original’ South Africans needed to be prioritized over other black people in the country.
According to the BBC, South Africa currently has 2.4 million immigrants who make up less than 4 percent of the country’s population.
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