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Zim exodus overwhelms SA
Wisani wa ka Ngobeni, Dumisane Lubisi and Dominic Mahlangu, The Sunday Times (SA)
July 23, 2006

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2153467

SOUTH Africa deported more than 51000 illegal Zimbabwean immigrants between January and June this year as floods of people fled economic collapse.

The Department of Home Affairs says it is now deporting 265 Zimbabweans a day. Last year, 97433 Zimbabweans were deported compared with 72112 in 2004.

The government is considering building a second detention centre in Limpopo to cope with the dramatic increase in illegal immigration from Zimbabwe.

The exact number of Zimbabweans in South Africa illegally is not known but analysts and government officials have estimated it at between three and five million.

The latest figures come as South African health services struggle to cope with thousands of foreign patients who have not been budgeted for.

Phuti Seloba, the Limpopo health spokesman, said yesterday that more than 800 patients, most of them illegal immigrants, had been treated over the past three months at Musina Hospital near Beit Bridge, in the northern region of Limpopo province.

More than 200 patients were admitted at the hospital. Of them, 19 died but only eight of the dead were claimed by their relatives, forcing the department to conduct pauper’s funerals for those unclaimed.

Seloba said the department could not deny the immigrants healthcare.

Zimbabwean police stationed near the Beit Bridge border with South Africa told the Sunday Times this week they had recorded a 29% increase in deportees in January this year compared with the previous year.

The Matebeland South police spokesman, Assistant Inspector Trust Ndlovu, said police had recorded more than 35000 Zimbabwean deportees between January and May.

In May, the cash-strapped Zimbabwean police handed over the job of dealing with deportees to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental organisation operating in 100 countries.

The IOM has since established a support centre for the deportees near Beit Bridge. At the centre they are offered food, shelter and transport to their homes.

Nick van der Vyver, head of the IOM at Beit Bridge, said his organisation received a total of 16394 deportees in a period of six weeks.

The Department of Home Affairs has taken a financial knock from the influx of illegal immigrants.

The government spent a total of R218-million on immigration control last year — more than double the amount the department spent in 2004. The increase in expenditure is "largely as a result of tightening control at Lindela [detention centre], an increase in the number of deportations and refugee control", according to the department.

The notorious Lindela detention centre outside Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg, which keeps foreigners due for deportation, is struggling to cope with the numbers of illegal immigrants.

The cost of detaining illegal immigrants has gone from R21.95 a day per detainee in 2001 to R75 a day today.

The department this week also confirmed it was considering plans to build another detention centre near Beit Bridge to deal with the influx.

The proposed detention centre has already been discussed with the Zimbabwean government, but department spokesman Nkosana Sibuyi said a final decision had not been made.

Home Affairs officials are also negotiating with Zimbabwe to allow the deportation trains to enter the country. At the moment, Zimbabwean deportees are offloaded at Beit Bridge.

On being deported, most of the deportees quickly find their way back into South Africa through makeshift entry points along the crocodile-infested Limpopo River.

Immigration analysts say the increase in the deportation of Zimbabweans shows that the influx of illegal immigrants from that country is on the rise as the economic meltdown continues unabated.

Van der Vyver said 92% of those deported from South Africa were men. He said that in one week at the beginning of this month his organisation had received 35 Zimbabwean children who had apparently been abandoned by their parents at the border.

The children had been referred to social services in Zimbabwe.

Dr Sally Peberdy, project manager of the Southern African Migration Project at Wits University, said the deportations showed that there was an increase in the number of Zimbabweans in South Africa illegally.

"The other thing that the figures possibly indicate is that there are new people [from Zimbabwe] coming that never came before. They are easy to find and they are not good at evading arrest," she said.

Professor Mike Hough, head of the Institute for Strategic Studies at the University of Pretoria, said more Zimbabweans were flocking to South Africa than those being deported.

He said the Department of Home Affairs did not have a plan to curb the influx.

"An increasing number of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants are living in informal settlements and it has become easier for them to evade arrest," he said.

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