Media: Birth ordeal outside clinic

In the latest indictment on the cape’s health-care centres, a teen was forced to deliver herbaby on the pavement after being turned away at a facility’s gates

March 23, 2009 Edition 1 (click here for edition 2)
SIPOKAZI MAPOSA, JADE WITTEN AND BRONWYNNE JOOSTE

Source: Cape Argus

A TEENAGER from Crossroads gave birth on the pavement outside the gates of the Guguletu Maternal Obstetrics Unit just hours after nurses discharged her, telling her she was not yet in labour.

Even when baby Yonela fell on to the pavement, security guards allegedly failed to help and the night shift nurses inside responded that the birth was not their problem since it was happening outside hospital premises.

The is the latest shocking revelation to rock the province’s state health-care services, after the Cape Argus revealed last week that a one-year-old baby had died on his grandmother’s back after she was turned away from three different health-care facilities.

Now the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign is threatening legal action on behalf of little Unabantu Mali.

Mncedisi Twalo, the organisation’s provincial co-ordinator, said they would lay a charge of negligence against the city, which has authority over the Nyanga Clinic, and the provincial government, which has authority over the Guguletu Community Health Centre and the Guguletu MOU, the three health-care facilities involved.

Media: Shack people bake to fight eviction

March 23, 2009 Edition 1
Karen Breytenbach

Source: Cape Times

A GROUP of more than 100 poor families from Delft say they are holding bake sales and karaoke nights to raise funds for legal representation to fight eviction by the City of Cape Town from their shack dwellings.

Represented by the Anti-Eviction Campaign’s Ashraf Cassiem, the group packed the Cape High Court on Friday to oppose an eviction application by the city.

The group is allegedly unlawfully occupying a piece of land that belongs to the provincial government on the pavement in Symphony Way, Delft.

Elections: A Dangerous Time for Poor People’s Movements in South Africa

Date posted: 12 March 2009
Source: SACSIS

History groans with the suffering caused by authoritarian individuals and regimes that were elected to power. For this reason the only useful measure of the commitment of any political project to democracy is to see how it responds to challenges to its own position and ideas.