SA social network takes a beating

As more and more people flee Zimbabwe and pour into South Africa’s cities, the social networks that have developed over the years to accommodate Zimbabweans are growing overburdened and, as a result, recent arrivals are increasingly having to brave life on the streets.

Lloyd, in his late twenties, left his job, wife and child in Chinhoyi, a town in north-west Zimbabwe in May. He earned a monthly salary of around Z$300 000 (about R10), and said there was simply no point in going to work anymore. ‘I thought because of the 2010 World Cup there would be openings here.”

There haven’t been many openings. ‘Since I arrived, I have worked once. The people we worked for a month ago keep postponing paying us,” he explains as he exchanges a cigarette with two friends on an icy Tuesday night at the Methodist Church sanctuary in Johannesburg’s CBD.

He says he misses his family, whom he has not spoken to in a month. ‘She [my wife] is waiting for me to come home. I just don’t know when I will get money to send to her.”

‘I was not involved in politics,” he says when asked whether he fled because of political persecution. ‘I just came here because things were bad. And although things are bad for me here, they are even worse for my family.”

‘The winter here is bad. One time it snowed and all I had for cover was cardboard paper. My feet were numb for hours,” he says, describing the days when he lived on the street.

Lloyd says he has not eaten a hot meal for weeks. ‘We have forgotten how pap tastes,” he says, adding ‘that’s why some of our people end up getting involved in crime”.

This is a point echoed by Theko Pharasi, the station commissioner at a police station in Alexandra. ‘Yes, Zimbabweans are involved in crime, especially breaking into business premises and street robberies.”

Pharasi could not provide figures for how many Zimbabweans his officers have arrested. ‘Of course, they don’t work independently. They work with our local people here.” Pharasi insists that the bulk of those involved in criminal activities cannot be the recent arrivals. ‘It’s people who have been around. There is no way you can come today, befriend local criminals and commit crime the following day.”

Now living in the relative comfort of a shack in Alexandra, Nkosinathi, who is in his thirties, comes from Bulawayo, the Zimbabwean city closest to South Africa and whose majority Ndebele speakers share an Nguni heritage with the Zulus. ‘I came last year,” he says.

‘We live on the occasional job that comes our way,” he says when asked how he survives. One of his friends explains that there are many Zimbabweans in the area. ‘There is everyone here: Ndebeles, Tongas and Shonas, all of them.”

There is no way of knowing how many Zimbabweans live in Alex. At the local clinic, CEO Abel Mangolele says he is not in a position to say whether there is an influx of Zimbabweans who come for medical attention, as they don’t ask people for their identity documents. ‘We just ask for local addresses and people just give out addresses. But it becomes difficult when our social workers do follow-up visits as the addresses they sometimes give are incorrect.”

National numbers on how many people are arriving are also hard to come by, but those who work with Zimbabweans in South Africa say that the numbers are definitely on the increase.

Toendepi Shonhe, a representative of the Movement for Democratic Change in Johannesburg, says, ‘Everyday I serve around 10 genuine cases of people who have fled political persecution in Zimbabwe.”

Shonhe says he writes letters for these people as supporting documents for their asylum status applications. He refers some of them to Zimbabwe Political Victims Association whose coordinator, Oliver Kubikwa, confirmed an increase in the number of people coming to their offices for assistance.

Analysts say that, with the campaign for next year’s elections set to begin soon and economic conditions continuing to deteriorate, the southward trek will continue.

Doubt over refugee numbers

Despite the avalanche of information that South Africans know about Zimbabwe and its people, no one quite seems to know precisely how many Zimbabweans are on South African soil.

Recently, Patrick Chauke, home affairs portfolio committee chairperson and ANC MP, suggested that there are up to 10-million foreigners in South Africa — the majority of them Zimbabweans. Local media has used the three-million figure since 2002, butsome analysts argue that two-million more Zimbabweans have arrived since the contentious presidential elections of 2002 and the subsequent worsening of conditions in the country.

Sally Peberdy of the Southern African Migration Project (Samp) argues that the three-million figure suggests that there are 1,5 Zimbabwean adults for every 10 South African adults, a scenario that she describes as highly unlikely.

‘I don’t know who came up with that figure and how they came up with it,” Peberdy says.

Loren Landau of the Forced Migration Studies programme at Wits University concurs that ‘there are no good numbers available”.

He said people have been streaming in and no one has been counting. But he said the last census in South Africa indicated that there were about 800 000 foreigners in the country. He said that the figure of three-million lends the impression that ‘people have been marching in a line into the country”, adding ‘that it doesn’t seem likely that three-million have come in”.

The question we should be asking, Landau suggests, is who is inflating this figure and to what end? Is the opposition Movement for Democratic Change trying to delegitimise the Robert Mugabe government, or the white farmers who lost out, the media, the NGOs or other interested parties? The answer to that is as imprecise as the figures bandied about. — Percy Zvomuya