Zimbabwe Emigrants’ Return Plans Thwarted by Mugabe Victory
Tendai Takawarasha spends his days hawking sunglasses and phone chargers to motorists at traffic lights in an affluent neighborhood of Johannesburg. For him, and many of the estimated 1.5 million mainly undocumented Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa, that’s better than going home, where President Robert Mugabe won a July
31 election that Takawarasha and many immigrants expected him to lose. Zimbabwe’s economic prospects are dimming since Mugabe, 89, followed his vote victory with threats to seize control of mines and banks from foreign and white investors and give them
to black citizens and the government.
“Go back for what? Can you find me one person who believes Zimbabwe won’t go back into another economic crisis?”
Takawarasha, 30, said in an interview in Diepsloot, a shantytown where he lives on the outskirts of South Africa’s largest city.
“We’re like the Mexicans in America, just looking for a better life.”
Zimbabweans started flooding over the South African border after Mugabe began seizing white-owned commercial farms in 2000
for redistribution to black citizens who grow food mainly for their own consumption. This started an economic collapse that
cut the size of Zimbabwe’s economy by two-fifths in eight years and pushed inflation to an International Monetary Fund estimate
of 500 billion percent.
Armed Gangs
While some of the migrants stand in line for as long as eight hours at the border town of Beitbridge before bribing
their way into South Africa, many walk miles from the town down the Limpopo River, which divides the two countries, before
illegally crossing the sandy river bed at night. They then face a trek through dense scrub to the nearest South African town of
Musina. En route they must evade armed gangs that prey on immigrants, army patrols and wild animals including lions and
elephants.
“One of the women with us was raped by seven men and wewere all robbed,” Jonasi Mavhaire, a university-educated 22-
year-old wearing scuffed jeans, said in an interview in Musina. “They let us go with only the clothes we were wearing.”
Musina has scores of homeless Zimbabwean children trying to make their way to their families. “I’ve been here for three weeks collecting money to go to Johannesburg to find relatives,” said Hazvinei Gumbo, a 12-
year-old orphan, who wore a torn red dress over her dusty skin as she sat on the sidewalk by a gas station begging passersby
for funds and food.
High Crime
The grimy town serves as the gateway to the rest of Africafor South African trucking companies ferrying goods from the
port of Durban. Its streets now throng with people speaking Zimbabwe’s main Shona language, while police signs warn
motorists not to stop because of the high crime levels. Some immigrants stay in Medecins Sans Frontieres-run camps
in Musina while they apply for asylum documentation, a process that can take weeks. Others sleep outdoors or find accommodation
in a nearby township.
After a disputed election in 2008, the 15-nation Southern African Development Community forced Mugabe and his Zimbabwe
African National Union-Patriotic Front party into a coalition with Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC
held economic ministries, Mugabe retained control of security portfolios, and the economy expanded for four consecutive years.
Now Mugabe and his party are back in control of economic policy after he beat Tsvangirai in the July elections. He won 61
percent of the vote, and his party captured a two-thirds majority in parliament.
Grim Outlook
“The economy is going to go down the drain,” Tonderai Tambudzika, a 32-year-old Zimbabwean who has no work, said in
Diepsloot. “Already Mugabe has started shouting about taking the mines and banks, which means they will collapse, just like
the farms.” Mugabe’s programs may cause a return to economic instability, said John Robertson, an independent economist in
Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. Already mining companies such as Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. have agreed to cede stakes while
banks including units of Barclays Plc and Standard Chartered Plc are in talks with the government.
The plans “they’re going to implement are the very same policies that led to the first economic crisis,” he said in an interview. “It’s going to be very bad for us.” Zimbabwe’s benchmark stock index has declined 18 percent
since Mugabe’s victory, falling 11 percent on Aug. 5, the first trading day after the results were announced.
Johannesburg’s University of The Witwatersrand has estimated the number of Zimbabweans in South Africa at 1.5
million, or more than a 10th of Zimbabwe’s population.
Undocumented Migrants
No one knows the exact number, Brian Hanekom, director of
People Against Suffering, Oppression & Poverty, a non-profit
group that assists undocumented migrants in South Africa, said
in an interview from Cape Town.
South Africa, which has an economy 38 times the size of
Zimbabwe’s and a population almost five times as big, offers the
promise of work for the immigrants, many of whom speak better
English than most South Africans and have a superior education.
Zimbabwe ranked 50th out of a survey of 144 countries in
terms of the quality of its math and science education while
South Africa ranked 143rd, according to the World Economic
Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report for 2012-13.
With an unemployment rate of 25.6 percent and competition
for housing and services in the poorest areas, South Africa has
seen resentment against foreigners erupt periodically in
violence. In 2008 more than 50 foreigners were killed in a spate
of rioting, and the army was deployed in townships for the first
time since the end of apartheid.
Political Violence
Unemployment in Zimbabwe is about 70 percent, and
opposition supporters often face the threat of political
violence. The World Food Programme said on Sept. 3 that a
quarter of the country’s rural population will need food aid
next year, the highest number since 2009.
Once in Johannesburg, or other major South African cities,
Zimbabweans take jobs ranging from domestic servants in affluent
suburbs to electricians; many work illegally.
Most live in areas like Diepsloot, a squalid collection of
shacks adjacent to Dainfern, one of Johannesburg’s most
exclusive gated communities. Some send a large proportion of
their earnings back home to support the children and elderly who
have remained behind. They travel to work in crowded minibuses,
the most common form of mass transport in South Africa, and are
preyed upon by criminals and corrupt police officers, who take
advantage of their lack of documentation to demand bribes.
Amnesty Program
In 2010 South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs oversaw
an amnesty program that allowed Zimbabweans in the country with
valid passports and proof of employment, a viable business plan
or enrollment in a recognized educational institution to apply
to stay for as long as four years. About 275,000 applied,
according to the department.
“We worked with Zimbabwean organizations here in South
Africa to encourage all Zimbabweans illegally in the country to
come forward,” Ronnie Mamoepa, a spokesman for South Africa’s
Department of Home Affairs said in a Sept. 16 interview. “It
isn’t possible to say how many are here illegally now.”
While the permits are renewable, there are reports that
some requests have been turned down, Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh,
head of the Refugees and Migrant Rights Program for
Johannesburg-based Lawyers for Human Rights, said in an
interview. Most will expire at the end of 2014, she said.
Between 200 and 300 Zimbabweans working illegally in South
Africa are deported each day, with 28,315 being sent back in the
first six months of this year, Charles Gwede, Zimbabwe’s chief
immigration officer in Beitbridge, said in a Sept. 16 interview.
Few return to Zimbabwe voluntarily.
Henry Munetsi, a 25-year-old university graduate who waits
on tables in Johannesburg’s financial center, went back home to
Zimbabwe for the election, “but I think that was my last
visit,” he said. “The economy cannot survive.”
By Brian Latham
Sept. 19 (Bloomberg) --