South Africa’s international land borders are as porous as the proverbial sieve, with tens of thousands of refugees streaming into the country each week, alongside gun-smugglers, drug-traffickers and stock thieves, says the Democratic Alliance (DA).
The party has called for the deployment of South African National Defence Force (SANDF) troops to the worst-affected border regions to bring the situation under control.
”There is a security vacuum in our border and rural areas,” DA safety and security spokesperson Dianne Kohler-Barnard told a media briefing at Parliament on Tuesday.
The border control coordinating committee (BCOCC), the body established to oversee border security, was not doing its job, and the South African Police Service — tasked with the actual patrols — was seriously under-equipped, the DA said.
”Despite having been created in 2001, the BCOCC still has no complete overall strategic plan relating to borderline policing, as well as no divisional policy relating to borderline operations,” she said.
South Africa was experiencing a ”flood of refugees”, who were entering the country at the rate of 28 000 a week. Besides Zimbabweans fleeing the troubles in their country, there were also ”huge numbers” of Nigerians, Kenyans and Congolese.
DA defence spokesperson Rafeek Shah called for the urgent creation of a specialised SANDF unit, ”paramilitary in nature”, to police South Africa’s long land borders, as well as the establishment of permanent border monitoring posts in high-risk areas.
Referring to cross-border criminal activity, he singled out the 491km Mozambique and 225km Zimbabwe borders as the main ”culprit areas”, while noting the high incidence of stock theft around landlocked Lesotho’s 909km border.
”When it comes to guns and weapons, it’s most likely the Mozambique border … human-trafficking as well. We know a lot of illegal immigrants, especially from the Asian sub-continent … come through [this] border.
”Smuggling of goods takes place mainly across the Zimbabwe border. ”I would say the two main culprit areas are Mozambique and Zimbabwe,” he said.
Kohler-Barnard noted there was high traffic in stolen vehicles across South Africa’s borders with Namibia and Botswana.
According to a DA document distributed at the briefing — titled Sealing our Borders — land border patrols are operating at 71% under capacity. There are also no permanent staff allocated to air patrols along South Africa’s land borders.
Further, the South African Police Service (SAPS) faced serious equipment shortages.
”There are frequently no fences in place and no compensating equipment such as helicopters, horses or quad bikes to patrol borders in areas not accessible by conventional vehicles.”
There were between three and five million illegal foreigners in South Africa.
The document calls for the role of the SANDF in borderline security to be looked at again.
”The DA believes that if the SAPS is going to retain responsibility for maintaining our borderline security, then not only must the SAPS border activities be overhauled, but the support role of the SANDF needs to be revisited,” it states. — Sapa