After years of being told about the millions of illegal foreigners in the country who are responsible for the high crime rate and who deprive South Africans of jobs and housing, the government has suddenly managed to lose a million Zimbabweans. Where did they go?
In the past we’ve heard about our porous borders and the quantities of foreigners flooding the country.
While the department of home affairs does not release official numbers, the South African Press Association (Sapa) reported that the department released a Human Sciences Research Council report stating that there could be as many as 4,1-million undocumented foreigners here.
Another study, by the Centre for Development and Enterprise, found that local government officials in Johannesburg believed there were about 2,15-million illegal foreigners in the city.
In March the provincial police commissioner claimed that there were three million illegal foreigners in Gauteng alone.
It now seems that these numbers were divined to suit the government’s purpose, which often involved displacing blame for the country’s social ills.
Whatever the figures, it is widely agreed that the majority of the illegal foreigners “flooding” the country are Zimbabwean.
Deadline approaching
With the deadline for the issuing of special permits for Zimbabweans rapidly approaching, and with doubts surrounding government’s ability to process all those seeking permits to avoid facing deportation, the government has adopted a new purpose — and a new set of numbers to suit this purpose.
The government seems intent on defending the deportation of Zimbabweans who remain undocumented after the December 31 deadline by claiming that they had ample opportunity to apply if they had a basis to remain in the country.
To support this contention, the government must lose approximately one million Zimbabweans.
The Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP) has estimated that there are between one and 1,5-million Zimbabweans in the country. Mkuseli Apleni, the home affairs director general, recently characterised this number as a “thumb suck”, with no basis in what he terms “scientific calculation”.
It is his characterisation, however, that is without basis. He is correct in believing that the numbers commonly cited have no basis in reality.
In an effort to respond to these unfounded and inflated numbers, the FMSP analysed census data, statistics provided by home affairs and other concrete data to come up with the most accurate estimation possible — one rooted in sound quantitative analysis rather than speculation. Its estimate has routinely been the lowest among numbers commonly bandied about.
The department’s representation of the FMSP’s estimate as inflated is itself without basis. It is being used to bolster the notion that the government will be able to process all Zimbabweans who wish to apply for the special permits before the deadline.
One needs only observe the queues outside the home affairs offices and talk to the individuals who have been trying to apply for days or weeks, to know that this is not the case. But if the department requires more concrete evidence, its own numbers also belie the claim that everything is running smoothly and that no Zimbabwean who qualifies for the permit will be left out in the cold.
The statistics
The oft-cited reason for the Zimbabwe regularisation process is that large numbers of Zimbabweans believed to be economic migrants have been overwhelming the asylum system.
According to the department’s statistics, 149 453 Zimbabweans applied for asylum in 2009. The department has repeatedly stated that between 90% and 97% of these applicants are economic migrants, a total of between 134 508 and 144 969. These are the people whom the special permits are purportedly targeting.
In the same statement in which the director general sought to discredit the FMSP’s estimate to affirm the department’s capacity to serve all the Zimbabweans eligible to apply for the permit, he said that 73 407 Zimbabweans had applied and 46 955 of those were still awaiting adjudication.
These applicants represent slightly more than half of those asylum seekers characterised as economic migrants in 2009, but the numbers of those wishing to apply are likely to be higher.
Moreover, according to these numbers, the government has thus far processed only 26 452 applications, which accounts for roughly 18% to 20% of the economic migrants who applied for asylum in 2009.
This proportion does not include those Zimbabweans who applied for asylum in 2010, or before 2009. Neither does it account for those who never entered the asylum process.
In other words, two-thirds of the way into the permit period, the government has not managed to issue permits to even a quarter of Zimbabweans from one sector alone – those who arrived in 2009 and applied for asylum.
Nonetheless, the department continues to assure us that there are no problems, that all eligible Zimbabweans will receive permits and that reports of backlogs and large numbers left in the lurch are exaggerated.
If there are no problems in issuing the permits, the department can safely say that any undocumented Zimbabweans in the country after December 31 had their chance and are clearly ineligible to remain in the country.
Denialism
While denialism in the face of a difficult problem may be appealing, pretending that Zimbabwean migrants are not here will not stop them from coming.
If South Africa does not set up an institutional structure to deal with an already existing regional labour system, it will spend the next decade — and billions of rands — fixing a “problem” that stems from its failure to assume its role as a regional leader. And what of the missing one million Zimbabweans?
On January 1 the department will begin to deport them while pretending that they were never here in the first place, disavowing any notion that these phantom foreigners were denied the opportunity to apply for the regularisation permits.
Dr Roni Amit is a senior researcher in the Forced Migration Studies Programme at Wits University