South African Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi recently lost a court case that anyone could have anticipated was unwinnable. He lost it on humanitarian and technical grounds.
It prevents him from terminating the government’s concession to refugees from neighbouring Zimbabwe.
In April 2009, South Africa provided legalised shelter for Zimbabweans hit by the economic and political crisis in their country. The Zimbabwe Dispensation Project was the first form of a policy to temporarily accommodate Zimbabwean refugees. It became the Zimbabwean Special Permit in 2014 and after 2017 it was known as the Zimbabwe Exemption Permit.
In 2021, home affairs decided to end the special dispensation after a period of grace lasting till the end of 2022 to allow Zimbabweans to regularise their circumstances.
The number of affected people is estimated at about 178 000 who remained on their ZE permits.
Elsewhere in Africa and around the world larger numbers of irregular migrants have been regularised.
But the current anti-migrant sentiment in South Africa made this difficult for the minister.
Policy documents and a law amendment on labour migration published a year-and-a-half ago are still in limbo. Will any reforms be implemented before the
general election of 2024? Probably not.
And yet, effective African economic development depends on economic integration. Most countries are small, especially economically, and effective integration entails the movement of persons across borders without excessive hindrances.
Not all African governments have been as hesitant as SA to reform migration policies. Members of both the East African Community and the Economic Community of West African States have made greater progress than the regions at the southern and northern ends of the continent.
We are studying migration policy and practice in four African countries, South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya and Nigeria, and in four regional organisations, Southern African Development Community (SADC), the East African Community, Ecowas and the African Union. We believe that countries and regions in
Africa can learn as much from each other as they can from experiences elsewhere.
Even in southern Africa there is an agreement between Namibia and Botswana on travel by their citizens across their common border with identity documents.
Perhaps cabinet will decide to grant the Zimbabwean exemption permit holders and their children the same kind of amnesty that was offered to 220 000 Mozambican refugees in December 1996.
- The analysis was first published in the Conversation. Hirch is emeritus professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town
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