By Hanna Ingber Win
Disabled refugees will soon receive government assistance, but disabled asylum seekers - even those injured while in South Africa - will continue to collect nothing.
The department of social development will extend social relief of distress grants to all disabled refugees in South Africa, according to Jacob van Garderen of Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR).
His strategic litigation unit, which represented disabled refugees and two organisations of which they are members, challenged the constitutionality of the exclusion of refugees from disability grants.
The department would change its system so applicants did not need a South African identification number to make a claim, he said. Once the policy was changed, the whole class of disabled refugees would receive grants to the same value as South African citizens.
Interim payments were already being paid to those refugees on whose behalf the application was brought, he said.
Asylum seekers, those who have applied for asylum or refugee status, will not receive the grant because their claim may be rejected, according to Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh of LHR.
Fatima Khan, refugee project counsellor at UCT Law Clinic, said she worked with many disabled refugees from war-torn areas. Her clients included refugees from places such as the Somali capital Mogadishu, who had had their legs blown off.
Khan also had clients who had been disabled in South Africa as a result of xenophobia. It was one thing if a person came to this country disabled, she said, "but it's another if a person becomes disabled within the country and that person can't receive any assistance".
Of the approximately 100 refugees in the African Disabled Refugees Organisation, the majority became disabled after they arrived in South Africa due to hate crimes, according to chairperson Anaclet Mbayagu. He said more than eight members of his organisation had been thrown out of a moving train, and four of them were subsequently in wheelchairs.
About half of the members of his organisation were refugees and would, therefore, receive the grant, but the others were still asylum seekers and would not receive any money, he said.
Twenty members were part of the court application filed with Lawyers for Human Rights and had already begun receiving disability grants, but the money was not enough to live on, he said.
The refugees could work and must rely on friends and family, he said.
"Some is better than nothing," Mbayagu said.
Ambaye Asfaw Kelbore, 30, fled political persecution in Ethiopia and came to South Africa in 2004. He was working as a salesman, he said, but two men robbed him and shot him in the chest last February, leaving him paralysed from the waist down. He says they did it because he was a foreigner.
Kelbore cannot work and will not receive government assistance because he does not yet have refugee status. He lives with his sister in Bellville.
"She also doesn't work because of me, because I need her help," he said.
"It's very hard for me."
The department of social development did not respond to telephonic requests for information.