Pretoria | Tuesday
SOUTH African farmers opposed to the repatriation of some 15 000 Zimbabwean farm workers reached an out-of-court settlement with the government on Monday, giving the workers a temporary reprieve.
The farmers filed for an urgent interdict in the Pretoria High Court to prevent the country from expelling the workers, whose work permits expired on Monday.
According to the deal reached late on Monday afternoon, South Africa’s home affairs department will make no arrests or carry out deportations before further talks have been held with agricultural unions in the area.
The deal also provides for dates to be set within a week to make representations in the case to Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
But home affairs representative Leslie Mashokwe said farmers were reneging on a deal made a year ago between them and the government to have all Zimbabwean workers off some 93 farms in the Limpopo valley in northeastern South Africa on the border with Zimbabwe.
Last week, the department again confirmed that no new Zimbabwean work permits would be issued.
The department argued that deportations would create jobs for South Africans in the impoverished Northern Province, where unemployment stands at 34%, according to 1999 government statistics.
“The issue at stake here is that they are willy-nilly decided to break their end of the bargain,” Mashokwe said.
The farmers have warned that a decision to hastily repatriate thousands of Zimbabweans workers would plunge the local economy into chaos. They are asking for more time to resolve the matter and phase out a foreign workforce that has been working on their farms for up to 15 years.
Many families lived on both sides of the South Africa-Zimbabwe border, divided by the Limpopo River. Some workers had married South Africans and had children with them.
The repatriation would leave farmers in want of a workforce to harvest crops, mainly perishable fruit and vegetables, said Edward Voster, a representative for AgriSA, the agricultural union umbrella body which represents mainly white farmers.
Voster added he could not state how many Zimbabwean farm workers had already left, but said that those who had had done so voluntarily.
“The people that have left so far have done so voluntarily because they didn’t want to find themselves caught by South African law,” he said.
– AFP