Zimbabwe’s government is adding more bricks to the wall it has built between itself and the rest of the world. Starting next month, university students who have received government assistance — which is most of them — will no longer be able to leave the country legally to seek employment elsewhere. Instead, they will be forced into a civil-service programme that will prohibit them from emigrating for several years, Washington Mbizvo, the permanent secretary of the Zimbabwean department of home affairs, announced last week.
This reality is grossly at odds with what most Zimbabweans want. A study by the Southern African Migration Project (Samp) of university students in three of the country’s biggest cities, Harare, Bulawayo and Gweru, shows that only 6% of the respondents have never considered leaving the country, with more than 50% saying they will emigrate within six months of graduating.
A study by the state-sponsored Scientific and Industrial Research Centre (SIRDC), which came out in September 2005, showed that about half a million Zimbabweans, mainly professionals in the health and education sector, had already emigrated.
While Zimbabwe is erecting walls around its borders, South Africa may be considering adopting a more a laissez faire attitude towards immigration from its northern neighbour. In Parliament last week, President Thabo Mbeki said that South Africa cannot build a ”great wall” between the two borders and that South Africans have to learn to live with Zimbabweans.
Experts the Mail & Guardian spoke to said Mbeki’s statement does not necessarily signal a change in policy on illegal immigration. It is just a ”recognition of the reality,” said Sally Peberdy, a project manager at Samp. ”He was just being realistic, it’s not possible to keep people out if they really want to come,” she said.
Daniel Molokele, a human rights lawyer, pointed out that last week the department of home affairs deported 1 800 illegal Zimbabwean immigrants and a further 3 000 are currently being held at Lindela where they await deportation. More continue to be arrested, he said.
Jacob van Garderen of Lawyers for Human Rights said: ”It is not enough to say we have to live with it. We have to make it legally possible for them to come and live here.” He pointed out that the Immigration Act provides limited scope and opportunities to migrate legally and urged the government to create mechanisms such as waiving visa requirements for Zimbabweans, as it has for citizens of Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and a number of other Southern African countries.
For a Zimbabwean to get a South African visitor’s visa he or she has to have R2 000 in travellers’ cheques, a letter of invitation, and copies of the identification documents of the persons they are visiting. ÂÂ
Minister of Home Affairs Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula was in Zimbabwe last week to meet her counterpart, Kembo Mohadi. The Herald, a state-owned daily, claimed that South Africa had agreed, in principle, to relax stringent visa requirements.
Responding to the M&G‘s questions on this matter, Cleo Mosana, of the department of home affairs, said this week: ”We will be working towards reciprocal visa waiver regimes with all SADC countries, as and when circumstances allow.”
Mosana added: ”If a Zimbabwean citizen is illegally in South Africa, he will be deported, unless he applies for asylum. When he applies for asylum he must show that he was forced to flee Zimbabwe for the reasons set out in the Refugees Act — basically he must show political persecution, as the country is not involved in a civil war.”
In 2006 the government took decisions on 1 981 applications for refugee status. ”Of this number only 103 applications for refugee status were approved. In other words, only 5% of applications were successful,” Van Garderen said.
Meanwhile, professionals, such as lawyers, face problems of admission and accreditation by the Law Society. Although the Attorneys’ Act allows certain exemptions, normally a foreigner has to possess a South African law degree or a degree certified by a South African University, and be either a South African citizen or a permanent resident in order to be admitted in terms of the Attorney’s Act.
To qualify for permanent residence in terms of the Immigration Act, a foreign national must be able to show the department of home affairs that he or she has an offer of employment from an employer. In practice, however, such offers of employment are only made to a person who has already been admitted as an attorney in South Africa. This creates a ”catch-22 situation”, said a Zimbabwean lawyer.
Nyaradzo Muzah-Chiwa, a Zimbabean lawyer, living in South Africa, but not working as a lawyer, said that Zimbabwean legal professionals have engaged the Law Society and ”have raised these difficulties with them”.
She said a number of lawyers fled Zimbabwe after being targeted for representing commercial farmers; she estimated that up to 400 trained Zimbabwean lawyers living in South Africa are currently idle.
Additional reporting by Haydée Bangerezako
Bureaucratic barriers to jobs
According to an engineering graduate from the National University of Science and Technology who came to South Africa in late 2005, getting his papers in order has proved hard. ”I have applied for the quota work permit and I am hopeful it will be granted.”
He said it has been difficult getting by in the 18 months he has been here and that he has been survived by teaching engineering subjects at an inner-city technical college in Johannesburg.
He described the work permit application process as long and bureaucratic. ”Last year I could not apply for a work permit as I didn’t have money to do so,” he said.
Yet another civil engineer said the process is too long and the requirements too onerous. ”They want too many things and the kind of money they want is prohibitive and beyond the reach of many cash-strapped Zimbabweans. For instance, to get Saqa [South Africa Qualifications Authority] evaluations urgently you have to pay over R700.” — Percy Zvomuya