Contraband cigarettes briefly replaced people on the smuggling routes from Zimbabwe when SA went into its Covid-induced hard lockdown in March 2020.
Two years on, the business of trafficking people and cigarettes alike is better than ever, smugglers say.
“There is serious money there,” says Michael Moyo*, a Zimbabwean with a stake in one such business.
When it comes to moving people, “each refugee pays R5,000 to cross into SA, and we share that money with border control”, he adds.
Asylum-seekers and migrants can cross easily into Zimbabwe from Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Angola. They spend a few days there before they cross the border into SA. Even Chinese nationals enter the country in this way.
“Your guys hardly bother the Chinese, because they don’t need visas,” Moyo says.
Zimbabwe is the main route for migrants into SA. And those border-crossings didn’t simply stop in the months when Beitbridge — the main border post for buses and freight trucks — was closed.
But while people continued to enter the country, SA’s refugee reception centres remained in hard lockdown.
Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi tells the FM: “When we closed the borders, all the countries were closing their borders and people were not moving freely. It would have been inconceivable to say to anybody running away from their country: ‘Here we are, we are open’.”
Even though SA’s neighbours opened for freight traffic a few weeks after the announcement of hard lockdown — and despite Beitbridge being fully open for more than six weeks now — the refugee centres remain stubbornly closed for new asylum applications.
And there’s no clear sense when they will be fully operational again. As department spokesperson Siya Qoza tells it: “[The centres] will be opened in line with the department’s risk-based approach to the safe resumption of services.”
This means there have been two whole years in which SA has not officially received or documented anyone coming into the country to seek asylum.
Yet Motsoaledi insists there’s no excuse for anyone entering SA not to have some kind of documentation.
“If you ask for asylum, you visit one of the five refugee reception centres,” he says. “By arriving there, even if you’re not given refugee status, the fact that they write you down, take your fingerprints, that’s documentation. So those people who don’t want to be documented are doing so deliberately.”
He adds that people could also go to police stations or ask at border gates to be documented.
Only, these aren’t necessarily geared for asylum seekers. And, of course, the refugee centres Motsoaledi refers to are still closed to new applicants.
Corruption pays. That’s a fact, and as long as the system is like this, we thrive
— Cross-border smuggler
The lack of documentation has been grist to the mill of xenophobic mobs in some local communities, such as Operation Dudula. Its members have been hounding traders and businesspeople, claiming they are foreign nationals without documents or are involved in criminal activities such as drug dealing. They say they’ve taken matters into their own hands because the police have failed to act.
This has apparently also put home affairs under pressure to be seen to be doing something.
SA deported between 15,000 and 20,000 people a year before lockdown, but Motsoaledi has only in recent weeks started regularly publicising the law enforcement that has been taking place in his department.
Last week he said in a statement that a refugee status determination officer had been arrested at the Desmond Tutu Refugee Reception Centre after taking R500 from a Bangladeshi man who was appealing a refusal of his application. (Though the offices are closed for new applications, issues with existing applications are being dealt with at the centres.)
A few days earlier, home affairs said it had imposed a R420,000 fine on a Zimbabwean transport operator who arrived at Beitbridge with a bus apparently carrying 28 Zimbabweans without passports.
“Anybody who does not respect the country’s immigration laws will face due consequences,” Motsoaledi said.
Yet Moyo says it has become close to impossible to get a passport in Zimbabwe. The country’s system has broken down, and passports are only for the well-connected.
Crossing the border without a passport has become a bit of a game for desperate Zimbabweans. That started before 2010, when visa-free travel was introduced between the two countries. Back then, the R2,000 required for an SA visa was more than most Zimbabweans could afford.
“Corruption pays,” Moyo says. “That’s a fact, and as long as the system is like this, we thrive,”
Home affairs needs to focus on getting the basics right if it is to manage migration effectively
— What it means:
Steps to tighten up the system started last year, with the establishment of the Border Management Authority (BMA).
“The BMA will enable the country to manage its borders in a manner that facilitates trade and plugs holes on our porous borders,” Motsoaledi said at the time, adding that SA’s “porous borders” lead to “illegal crossing of people, illicit goods, drugs, trafficking of people, particularly of women and children, and stolen vehicles”, among other issues.
Last year, he appointed Nakampe Masiapato as BMA commissioner, and tasked him with getting the authority up and running. By April next year, the BMA should be fully operational as an independent entity, reporting to the minister of home affairs.
To this end, it recently advertised for border guards.
The BMA’s mandate entails “facilitating and managing the legitimate movement of persons and goods within the border law enforcement area and at ports of entry”, Masiapato told parliament’s home affairs portfolio committee in November.
It will also co-ordinate its law enforcement functions with other organs of state, such as the police, revenue service, defence force and border communities, and deal with “all kinds of inter-jurisdictional crimes”, such as human and wildlife trafficking, movement of counterfeit goods, and illegal border crossings.
The department’s “strict counter-corruption branch” will continue to operate in the BMA.
But critics say the entity has been concentrating more on its logos, vehicles and recruitment than on getting the basics right. They say the emphasis appears to be on stopping movement, rather than facilitating it.
Road Freight Association CEO Gavin Kelly, for example, says his organisation’s members have been left in the dark. “No input from industry has been requested, nor is there any collaboration in place to ensure that the planned implementation will have the support of all those who will be affected, or play a role in the cross-border movement of passengers or freight,” he tells the FM.
Another point of concern is the focus on safety and security over trade facilitation.
SA Association of Freight Forwarders’ Juanita Maree says: “When you look at risk management, you cannot treat people and cargo in the same way. So will the BMA make legal movement across borders more efficient? Do they have the systems, and will they employ the right officials to do the screening?”
She says the association hasn’t yet seen the systems the BMA is working on, but assumes that these are under way.
Another point of concern for Kelly is that there’s been little consultation with industry over the One Stop Border Post Policy, through which home affairs wants to harmonise the movement of people and goods through its land borders, in line with the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement. The aim is to address delays, which can sometimes last days and which stymie trade.
The cabinet approved the policy last month, but Kelly says the RFA has had little opportunity to provide input.
Still, he believes there are actions border authorities can take immediately to address delays, including providing backup generators for when the electricity goes out, and addressing staffing issues.
Delays have “dire implications for transit trade through the borders and the harbour ports, with freight moving to our neighbours”, he says. “This will further affect the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement.”
Meanwhile, SA diplomats in other African countries have complained that Motsoaledi’s rhetoric is increasingly coming across as xenophobic. This, they say, hampers their efforts to establish good relations and trade with regional partners — one of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s stated aims for economic growth.
“It’s like there is a complete disconnect between the two,” one complains. "And it’s helping no-one.”
* Moyo is not his real name, but has been changed at his request as a condition of speaking to the FM
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