Adriaan Basson | The ANC's fake bogeyman called Zimbabweans
From welcoming our troubled neighbours to chasing out families with children. When did the ANC start to hate Zimbabweans, asks Adriaan Basson.
The ANC government of President Cyril Ramaphosa wants you to believe booting around 180 000 Zimbabweans and their families out of South Africa will solve unemployment and restore the dignity of our immigration policies.
It is a barefaced lie. The state-sanctioned attack on the thousands of people in possession of a Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP) is a desperate, populist attempt to create a bogeyman ahead of the 2024 election on which the ANC can blame its own governance failures.
This is the same party that opened our borders to desperate, poor and abused Zimbabweans when the brutal regime of Robert Mugabe was at its height in the early 2000s. Then-president Thabo Mbeki, who refused to criticise Mugabe's brutality, justified opening our borders by championing the African Renaissance.
Africans, Mbeki and the ANC championed, should be welcomed anywhere on the continent. The assistance and support of Zimbabwe to the ANC during its liberation struggle meant the new South Africa was a friendly place for our neighbours north of the Limpopo River.
This meant hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans made South Africa their home, courtesy of the ANC. Many of them, like history teacher Hastings Mpofu, found a new life in South Africa and plied their trade wherever they could.
READ | Steven Gordon: Zim Exemption Permit termination - does this reveal an intolerant SA?
We all know the stories of Zimbabwean accountants, engineers and doctors working as Uber drivers, waiters or petrol attendants in South Africa. But at least they had some form of peace, away from Mugabe's madness, here.
Integration
The South African economy was growing, and Zimbabwean asylum seekers integrated with South Africans, opening businesses, trading together, praying alongside each other in church or falling in love.
Many Zimbabweans now occupy top positions in South African society - Professor Tawana Kupe, vice-chancellor of the University of Pretoria; Vodacom SA CEO Sitho Mdlalose, and Santam CEO Tavaziva Madzinga to name a few. And what would the Springbok World Cup-winning squad have been without Tendai "Beast" Mtawarira?
But somewhere in the past few years, under Ramaphosa's leadership, the ANC fell out of love with Zimbabweans. Under the guise of saving money, creating jobs for South Africans and applying immigration policies, Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi now oversees the ANC's version of apartheid forced removals by stubbornly refusing to renew ZEPs for the 180 000 people who hold them.
Unless you are a rocket scientist, chartered accountant or physician, you are basically doomed and will have to leave the republic by the end of December with your children, who have likely never set foot in Zimbabwe.
The ZEPs expire at the end of the year and if you are not in possession of a new visa by then, you will be deported. The majority of Zimbabweans with ZEPs do not perform scarce skills jobs and will unlikely qualify for any other permit.
This is the cruelest of policies, stubbornly pushed through by a government that claims to champion human rights under a president who recently served as the head of the African Union.
READ | Unwelcomed Neighbours - an investigation by News24
Last week, News24 published a series of stories of Zimbabweans living in South Africa who face being chucked out of the country in six months' time. These are people living in extreme fear and anxiety about their futures in a country that welcomed them under the African Renaissance banner.
Xenophobic bandwagon
They are here legally, pay their taxes and are integrated members of South African society. Some of them have been here since 2008, when the ANC government under Mbeki introduced the Dispensation of Zimbabwean Permit (DZP) to thousands of Zimbabweans who had fled Mugabe's war. The fact that they are still viewed as aliens boggles the mind.
Of course, the ZEPs were never meant to be permanent features of our immigration policy, but instead of creatively phasing them out or converting them into other legal forms of residency, the ANC, through Motsoaledi, has jumped on the xenophobic bandwagon in our streets.
Motsoaledi's incoherent, illogical rage last week against the Helen Suzman Foundation, which is challenging the decision to scrap ZEPs in court, reveals his desperation to push through this populist policy at all costs.
"The decision of the minister not to extend the exemptions granted to Zimbabwean nationals has been widely supported by South African citizens," his statement read, showing the true purpose of this move - to get the xenophobes on Twitter and in the streets, behind people like Nhlanhla Lux, on the side of the ANC when we go to the polls in 2024.
And all of this is done with Ramaphosa's blessing. If not, he should immediately rebuke Motsoaledi and reverse this hateful resolve.
- Adriaan Basson is editor-in-chief of News24.
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