Flygtninge fra Robert Mugabes fallerede Zimbabwe har i årevis søgt tilflugt og fundet arbejde syd for grænsen. Men nu sender Syd Afrika de mange zimbabweanere tilbage – til en hverdag uden jobmuligheder og til et land i økonomisk opløsning.
HARARE, 6 June 2013 (IRIN) – Maxwell Zimbume, 37, left his job at a beverage company in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, at the height of the country’s economic crisis in late 2008.
His salary was not being paid regularly and had become almost worthless due to hyperinflation. Like hundreds of thousands of other Zimbabweans, he decided to try his luck in neighbouring South Africa.
After failing to obtain a passport at the Registrar General’s office, where officials demanded hefty bribes, Zimbume slipped into South Africa without one.
He found work teaching information technology at private colleges in Pretoria and Johannesburg, and earned enough for his wife and two children to join him. His wife, a trained bookkeeper, found a job at a supermarket as a cashier.
South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs declared a moratorium on deportations of undocumented Zimbabwean migrants in 2009, and later gave them the opportunity to regularize their stay by applying for work and study permits through the Zimbabwe Documentation Project (ZDP), but neither Zimbume nor his wife applied.
Because they had entered the country without passports, they did not think they were eligible, and suspected that the ZDP was a way of trapping undocumented migrants.
About 276,000 Zimbabweans applied for work, business and study permits under the ZDP, according to South Africa’s Home Affairs Department – a fraction of the 1 to 1.5 million Zimbabwean migrants that the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated were living in the country.
As the ZDP project concluded, South Africa lifted the moratorium on deportations in October 2011.
Since then, IOM says it has assisted 50,635 returnees – an average of 2,600 deportees per month – at the Beitbridge Reception and Support Centre at South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe.
The figure, says the organisation’s acting chief of mission in Zimbabwe, Natalia Perez, is “only a reflection of returnees who have opted for IOM assistance, and not necessarily the total number of returnees from South Africa since the resumption of deportations”.
No work at home
One night in April 2012, police officers raided the house where Zimbume and his family were living.
They were detained for two days at the local police station before being transferred to Lindela Repatriation Centre outside Johannesburg, the main departure point for undocumented foreign nationals awaiting deportation.
Finally, they were loaded into a truck with scores other Zimbabweans and taken to the border.
They left behind all of their household goods, arriving in Zimbabwe with only a few clothes and a little money.
“Since our deportation, my wife and I have been trying to find jobs, but all the companies we have approached say they are not recruiting because they are still struggling. We have been living from hand to mouth from the time we returned,” Zimbume told IRIN.
Zimbume is among thousands of deportees, among them skilled workers, who are struggling to restart their lives in an economy that has not recovered enough to accommodate them.
“There are no livelihood opportunities for most of the deportees. There is a groundswell of unemployment that has been worsened by the deportations, pushing poverty levels in Zimbabwe up,” Innocent Makwiramiti, an economist and former chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, told IRIN.
Another economist, Eric Bloch, said even the informal sector was “overcrowded”.
“The informal sector is also a victim of a poorly performing economy and cannot be expected to absorb the returnees who are inflating the number of unemployed people [estimated at more than 80 percent]. There are only a few exceptional cases who are getting employed because their skills are in short supply,” Bloch told IRIN.
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Last month, Zimbabwe’s home affairs ministry officially requested that its South African counterpart postpone further deportations. Home Affairs Co-Minister Theresa Makone told IRIN that they have yet to receive a response.
“Our position as a government is that the deportations should be done in a humane manner and should ensure that there is no extreme suffering of deportees,” she said.
Makone promised that her ministry would help needy returnees acquire documents to enable them to travel to other countries, but added that the South African government should consider reopening the ZDP as an alternative to deporting Zimbabweans.
Arnold Sululu, a member of Zimbabwe’s parliament who sits in the home affairs and defence committee, told IRIN: “While South Africa has legitimate reasons to deport undocumented Zimbabweans, the problem is that a significant number among them are leaving their jobs to come home and face severe unemployment and no livelihood opportunities.
