Medical Personnel in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Nexus between Political Change and Migration

Abstract

This paper is based on research that provides an overview of the factors that encourage international migration among medical workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. Through a brief insight into Sub-Saharan Africa and an in-depth view of working conditions in one of South Africa's city's hospitals (Durban) we are able to appreciate what spurs on the urge to migrate northwards. The choice of these two categories rests with how the dynamics of transformation and equity policies are manifesting more than two decades after the country's first general election. In viewing their qualifications as an enabling factor in their mobility, the discussion here locates the actual experiences of South African medical personnel within the broader framework of working and political conditions in the African continent. The assertion in this paper is that while the choice for international relocation is both professional and personal, they actually emerge out of a plethora of disablements. In South Africa it is especially through endemic violence and affirmative action (push factors), viewed here as a re-racialisation of post-apartheid South Africa. Political transformation after April 1994 has led from exuberant euphoria to utter despair in service deliveries. The health service has not been spared by the complacencies of bureaucratic inertia, selective appointments and reverse racism. It is against the backdrop of such conditions that the perceived positive social and political conditions in developed countries have become major sources of attraction for medical personnel from South Africa. Through the use of interviews and observations, this paper reveals that the current working situation for doctors in South Africa is more retrogressive than progressive.