At the mercy of SA government

THE trigger for the recent xenophobic attacks has absolutely nothing to do with the moral character of South Africa’s poor.

The underlying cause is that four million “illegal” immigrants have been allowed into the country with no plan or policy in place to deal with them.

South Africans can live with poverty. In the first five years after the millennium, a whole generation of poor grandmothers – particularly in the Eastern Cape – single-handedly saved the economy from buckling under the welfare cost of a million Aids orphans.

South Africans can even live with betrayal. During the 2004 general elections in Mthatha – the city which has seen a failure of government delivery above all others – I met a man who had been standing on the same street corner for 15 years, hoping for a day’s labour from passing motorists.

He said: “The ANC is like a wife who is being unfaithful to you for a long time, with some rich guy. But if you love a woman, you love her.”

But what no South African can live with is injustice or the perception of it.

The Democratic Alliance is wrong in its claims that the xenophobic violence seen in Alexandra and elsewhere were triggered by an absence of service delivery. For 14 years, South Africans have shown a Job-like tolerance for lack of delivery. Instead, it is precisely when delivery does happen – and happen visibly – that perceptions of injustice translate to violence.

In the Western Cape, it was only after physical construction of the N2 Gateway Housing Project began, that major clashes broke out between poor coloured communities and Xhosa migrants from the Eastern Cape.

Longtime Xhosa residents of settlements such as Joe Slovo attacked the domestic migrants as “outsiders” believing them to have jumped the queue on the housing waiting-lists. With the recent attacks on foreign migrants, the trigger is the same – and has nothing to do with the moral character of South Africa’s poor, as has been widely insinuated. Instead, it’s about the moral character of a government that has provided no national response to one of the greatest emergency migrations in the world in the past quarter of a century.

Here is what really happened in Alexandra.

The Alexandra Renewal Project is both a staggering failure and a remarkable success. Launched in 2001 as a way to provide homes to 22,000 families and better living standards for everyone by 2008, this “presidential lead project” has seen just 3,000 families get a house in a township designed for 60,000 but home to 450,000 residents.

The project clears shacks on a block- by-block basis to make way for new schools, sports grounds and housing infrastructure.

Everyone displaced in this process is allotted a basic and supposedly temporary house at a newly constructed “transit village”. South Africans who qualify for subsidies are moved from there to two-bedroom RDP houses.

Undocumented migrants don’t qualify and are supposed to move from the transit camp into rental units.

The trouble was that the first batch of more than 500 rental units were not yet ready for occupation, and so migrants tended to stay longer in the transit camp houses. To many South Africans still living in shacks, it appeared as if migrants had been “given” the smart- looking transit houses, or were there waiting for the completion of “their” RDP houses in the new Extension 7.

It’s hard to criticise the project managers for the general plan, which is breathtakingly ambitious and makes no attempt to exclude residents based on their legal status. Except that there was neither planning to anticipate the conflict trigger of sudden development, nor sufficient communication to residents on how those who don’t qualify for subsidies might benefit.

But the project managers are not to blame for the recent violence. The underlying cause is simply that more than four million “illegal” foreigners – mostly desperate economic migrants from Zimbabwe and Mozambique – have been allowed to flow into the country with no national policy or plan in existence to deal with them.

This was the conclusion of the Forced Migration Studies Programme at Wits in its recent report: Responding to Zimbabwean Migration to South Africa. “The scale of the impact is just as much the result of the lack of responses to the migration flow as to the migration itself. The lack of a clear policy decision can also lead to popular disaffection.”

Worse, the individual plans that do exist to help or regulate undocumented migrants have not been acted on.

For instance, migrants are eligible for social relief or distress grants, yet few, if any, have benefited from the plan.

The government is also mandated to provide services to all unaccompanied minors, including those here “illegally”, yet the programme to assist thousands of these children “has not (been) implemented” stated the report.

And, most significantly, up to one- third of migrants we see selling wire animals on the roadside or begging, actually possess education or skills desperately sought in South Africa, yet there has been no serious attempt to audit their skills and plug them in here.

Only the Education Department has allowed “illegal” Zimbabwean teachers of maths, science and English to get on with their important jobs, rather than ignore or deport them, says the report.

“The Department of Health has made no effort to facilitate recruitment of qualified Zimbabwean medical personnel who are already in the country, in spite of a dire shortage of skills.”

Those who attack and persecute people based on their nationality and alleged legal status should be prosecuted — and prosecuted individually, without the shield of mob violence.

But if four million undocumented foreigners continue to be barred from participating in South African society– in the absence of any public policy which explains both their plight and value – then any success they have will inevitably be seen as an injustice by South Africans living in worse conditions.

The legal solutions are varied but uniformly difficult. One among them is a “temporary protection regime” for migrants, currently “under consideration” by Home Affairs.

Others include temporary resident status and varying forms of “leave to remain”. Whichever form is chosen must encourage a fast-tracked harnessing of migrant skills and the provision of financing for small business, if only because xenophobia cannot survive where foreigners create new jobs.

Wits report authors suggest President Thabo Mbeki could be forgiven for not taking the lead in a new national policy on undocumented migrants, because of his current mediation role with Robert Mugabe. But Mbeki has made himself the high guardian of undocumented migrants by forcing millions to fend for themselves in a foreign land, and it is exactly he who must now utter the word “Welcome” – and make sure everyone hears. - Daily Dispatch