The Delicate Frank Balance: The Issues About Zimbabwean Migration To South Africa And Tafadzwa Jumo Exposé

Zimbabwean Migration: The mass migration of Zimbabweans to South Africa has been one major characteristic of the Southern African socio-political landscape in recent years. This story centers around the relentless chase of greener pastures, placed within the context where legal and social hurdles usually seem insurmountable.

Their record on whistle blowing has seen Carte Blanche and Tafadzwa Jumo break the “cash for days” story, complicating an already complex situation.

But the impact of his exposé is more far-reaching than that, and reached across documented as well as undocumented immigrant groups in South Africa, bringing up issues concerning both why people migrate to begin with; legal constraints surrounding foreign residents there from elsewhere on the continent — Zimbabweans included; and what happens when a criminal underworld so entrenched becomes exposed.

For many Zimbabweans the pull of South Africa is myriad, but largely economic and borne out of a desperate situation. This prompted many Zimbabweans to come over here where they could find jobs, because we are much better off than them back home.

South Africa, with its moderately stable economy and proximity serves as a ray of hope. But these better life prospects often come with a terrible price — xenophobia, legal hurdles and exploitation. South Africa is both sanctuary and battlefield, an indication that migration has its ornery ways!

A more clandestine part of this migration is the under-reported practice known as “buying days,” an episode in which Jumo dramatically intervened and revealed. In a documentary seen by The Zim Bulletin News, this includes the illicit buying of stay permits which enables displaced people to remain for all intents and purposes in South Africa without experiencing the correct (and frequently burdensome) process.

The cash-for-days economy is more than a black market. It offers life to those who are afraid of being displaced back home, banned or not able to support themselves. It exposed a corruption network from street level facilitators to even darker figures in “some administrative levels”, that turned into an illegal residency market.

The legislation that regulates foreign nationals in South Africa is both quite prescriptive and at the same time permeated with loopholes, which has merely given birth to illegality such as for cash-for-days schemes. By law, foreigners in South Africa have to hold appropriate visas or permits if they want to live and work within that country.

The most common kind of permits are work visas, study visas & asylum seeker permits. The manner in which one acquires these papers is tedious, requiring an adamant proof of employment or the sponsorship (sponsor based visa) to begin with.

Indeed, too many Zimbabweans find the barriers insurmountable and seek other avenues to regularize their stay, even if these paths lie within illegal terrain.

Periodic amnesties and special dispensations for Zimbabweans have further complicated South Africa’s immigration policies. Zimbabwean Special Dispensation Permit and its temporary counterparts such as the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit were implemented as temporary measures to legalise the status of Zimbabweans seeking refuge from economic difficulties and political instability.

However, the reinstatements of these permits have not proved to be permanent solutions, instead, renewals have only created anxiety of the periodical purges from the immigrant community.

The precarious nature of the policies, combined with the ineffective and corrupt Home Affairs Department, laid the grounds for the existence of the cash-for-day’s industry. The ramifications of Jumo’s exposé have been extensive, especially for the Zimbabwean South African diaspora.

For the unregistered migrants, the news has instilled a sense of anxiety and has created an uncertain environment for many. The crackdown which followed the exposé has made being in South Africa as an illegal an even riskier initiative.

The community now lives in constant worry as they fear being ambushed by the authorities at any time. The evaporation of the cash for days option has cornered many leaving them with no way to regularize their papers. For the registered ones, the exposé was a two-edged sword.

While it was a revelation of the underlying circumstances that make the system susceptible to exploitation, it also lumped everyone in with the illegal migrants. The exposé has also sparked a broader discussion on the propriety of South Africa’s immigration policies regarding citizens emanating from fragile countries like Zimbabwe.

As important as the legal repercussions are, one could argue that its social impact is equally if not more meaningful. Widespread corruption in services of the State seems to have enflamed an already delicate issue of xenophobia which has been festering in South Africa for some time.

Communities frustrated by high levels of unemployment and service delivery failures frequently turn their wrath on foreign nationals, seeing them as threats for scarce resources. This exposé has merely poured fuel on this fire with some sections of the South Africa public perceiving cash-for-days as an example of Zimbabwean abusing their country’s weaknesses.

However, the story is not that simple. That, in part is what the exposé has also shown — how desperate and vulnerable Zimbabwean migrants really are and that many turn to illegality not as an option but because their situation leaves them with little choice.

Bringing to the fore moral questions on criminalizing migration where migrants have no other legal way of migrating, or lawful ways fail.

The implications of what Jumo told me stretch out further to asylum, and are part an argument in support for a more humanitarian-orientated immigration policy rooted not just on deterring the act itself (which is proven not work) but deals with underlying issues incentivizing migration.

Emboldened by the exposé ZImbabweans both in Zimbabwe and South Africa are once again talking about how they can not continue to hang harps upon willows. Illegal migrants face potentially life-threatening risks of exploitation, deportation or violence; but those suffering the worst in Zimbabwe appear to reckon it is worth taking such chances.

As outrageous as the cash-for-days scandal is, it underlines systemic failures that have pushed many people to flee their home in search of a better life; perhaps alive.

The fallout, from what happened with Jumoism is another area where many Zimbabweans in SA are still unsure about. The campaign to curb illegal migration will undoubtedly win back the South African authorities some ground in terms of being seen to be acting on uncontrolled lawlessness — but it does not really address the issues that drive Zimbabwean migrants into existence.

Migrants will continue to come until fundamental changes take place in the Zimbabwean economy and politics. But Jumo’s exposé is a glaring reminder of how conditional our livelihoods are and what that does to people when the structures around them prove incapable or incompetent in responding to universal human needs.

There is absolutely no doubt that Tafadzwa Jumo turned his lights on the ‘cash-for-days’ scheme and in doing so left a huge dent both to corrupt elements as well systems which collude with their practices.

And it has shone a light on the lives of those Zimbabweans in South Africa, between the rock that is economic hopelessness to the north and legal and social invisibility further south. The road ahead is a difficult one, but it also provides the opportunity for South Africa and Zimbabwe to rethink their approaches on migration and related policies.