Mishehe Kalohua opens his asylum-seeker permit tenderly. The tattered page, held together by sticky-tape, has been opened and refolded so often over the past year and a half that it has become as flimsy as cheap toilet paper.
”They keep giving me a one-month extension and telling me to come back for a decision on my [permanent] status next week. I have to keep coming back,” says Kalohua.
The 28-year-old Congolese father of two says he has been waiting for well over a year for a response from the refugee status determination officer to his application for refugee status in the country. The worn page, littered with pink extension stamps, bears testimony to that — and is the only thing between him and jail or deportation.
While the Refugees Act allows for Kalohua to seek recourse from the standing committee for refugee affairs because his application has not been adjudicated within the stipulated 180 days, this is furthest from his mind.
”I can’t afford the bus from Effingham [a suburb about 10km from the department of home affairs on Umgeni Road in Durban’s CBD]. I have no job because people say I can only stay here for a month and they don’t want to hire me,” he says.
A dejected figure among many in the home affairs Umgeni Road waiting room, Kalohua says he survives by taking odd jobs wherever he can.
The Refugees Act allows for two-year refugee-status permits to be issued to people who qualify. But the department has recently insisted that refugees renew their status every year, rather than every two, angering refugee organisations.
The KwaZulu-Natal Refugee Council (KZNRC) has questioned the DHA’s capacity to ensure that the new directive does not cause even more asylum seekers to become mired in a Kafkaesque state of never-ending bureaucracy, insecurity and flux.
”The department [of home affairs] is treating us like animals,” says Pierre Matate, deputy coordinator of advocacy at the KZNRC.
The department was unable to comment on the backlog of refugee status determinations or its capacity to deal with more paperwork.
Home affairs spokesperson Jacky Mashapu says the decision to shorten the status period would facilitate the ”cessation process” — the beginning of repatriation — for refugees from countries where conditions had improved and their safety could be ”guaranteed”.
”It is true that withdrawing refugee status cannot be a simple process based on fragile peace accords. A thorough analysis of conditions in such a country will be made — affected refugees will have an opportunity to rebut any decision to withdraw their refugee status, even through a court of law if needs be,” says Mashapu, responding to a list of emailed questions.
But at a side entrance to the Umgeni Road refugee centre the reality isn’t as clear-cut and easy. ”I came here at seven in the morning because my two-year permit is about to expire, but they say today they are dealing with marriages and I must come on Monday,” says Trezor Kakadje* (33) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
”I don’t have the time or the money. I’ve already wasted one day’s pay because I couldn’t go to work,” says Kakadje, who works as a security guard and studying electrical engineering.
* Not his real name