Zimbabwean and SA authorities meet over passport confusion

SW Radio Africa: Zimbabwean government authorities have been meeting with officials in South Africa this week, to try and clarify the ongoing confusion surrounding the issuing of passports for Zim nationals trying to regularise their stay in the country. South African Home Affairs officials are in the process of adjudicating more than 270 000 applications made by Zimbabweans for permits, which will allow them to stay in the country legally. But there is lingering confusion over how many of those applicants still need passports from the Zim government, with figures supplied by both countries not adding up. According to Zimbabwean authorities the country has received 58, 100 applications for passports, of which 16, 427 have been issued. In contrast, South Africa’s Home Affairs Director General Mkuseli Apleni said on Tuesday that, with more than 270 000 applications, “you can see the difference is huge.” “There is therefore the assumption that if 58, 100 have applied for passports and we in South African have received 275, 622 applications for documentation, then the remaining applications do not have passports,” Apleni said. Apleni added that it was not clear if these remaining applications already had passports before the documentation process was launched last year. But he said that about 350 of the applications currently being processed per day did not have passports.  The Zimbabwean government was set to give South Africa feedback on Tuesday on a strategy to ensure people get passports. “They will also have to tell us how those who have not yet applied for passports can be assisted,” Apleni said. The South African authorities last week extended its moratorium on Zim deportations until August, setting a June deadline for the permit applications to be processed. Apleni said on Tuesday that they were on track to meeting that deadline, but again emphasised that “we are co-dependent upon the Zimbabwean government to meet our deadline of 30 June 2011 to conclude this process – this pertains to the issue of the production of passports.” The Zim government has been fiercely criticised for its failure to issue enough passports to its citizens in South Africa, and for refusing the repeated offers of assistance to get enough documents printed. The situation reached crisis point last year when thousands of Zim nationals looked set to miss the December 31 deadline to make their permit applications, simply because they didn’t have passports.

South African authorities were eventually forced to make some concessions in an attempt to give as many Zimbabweans as possible a chance to regularise their stay in the country. These included receiving applications without passports, with Home Affairs officials accepting proof of passport applications, in the form of receipts. Gabriel Shumba from the Zimbabwe Exiles Forum told SW Radio Africa on Tuesday that the Zim authorities had let people down, saying their actions “indicate to people in the Diaspora that they (the government) don’t care about their citizens.”