Thousands of Zimbabweans living and working in South Africa failed to meet the December 31 deadline set by authorities in the neighbouring country for them to get proper documentation.
South Africa has since said it would only resume deportations of those who failed to take advantage of the dispensation in August but would not take in new applications.
Parents who left children to seek jobs in what is Africa’s biggest economy remain stuck in their adopted land, desperate to be recognised as legal immigrants after years of playing hide and seek with authorities.
The cat and mouse game landed many at the dreaded Lindela transit camp for deportees. The failure to get passports by parents in South Africa has thrown the education of thousands of schoolchildren in Bulawayo into uncertainty, with school officials saying many failed to report for classes after parents did not remit money for school fees.
Meanwhile, other parents who decided to return home in December to make passport applications at local offices were stranded after failing to have their papers processed in time for them to return to their jobs.
Zimbabwean passport officials have been accused of bureaucratic bungling after failing to utilise the SA government donation of a state-of-the art passport processing equipment last month.
But it turned out the biggest casualty of the crisis were children whose parents were illegally settled in South Africa.
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Samson Mthombeni, a deputy headmaster at a government secondary school in Bulawayo said a number of children had not turned up for classes since the term opened on January 12.
“We have a number of students here whose parents are working in South Africa but their story is the same: they say their parents got caught up in processing their passports and have not sent them money for school fees,” Mthombeni said.
“It’s not a nice picture”.
Mthombeni said while the affected children had paid their fees on time in the past, this year had been different. He speculated this could be connected with the rush for passports by Zimbabweans illegally staying in SA.
Government schools defy minister over fees
Government schools continue to turn away children who have not paid their fees despite a directive issued last year by Education minister David Coltart (pictured) that no child would be denied the right to education because they failed to pay tuition fees.
Last year, the United Nations Children Education Fund (Unicef) raised concerns about the huge drop-out of school children as parents failed to pay fees and other educational costs.
There are no hopes that this year will be different.
Passport officers demand bribes from desperate ZimbabweansZimbabweans working in South Africa had expected that the acquisition of passports would be a step towards making their movement easy, but reports in Bulawayo indicate that the process was fraught with corruption.
The reports indicated that officials from the Registrar General’s Office were allegedly demanding as much as 1000 rand from individuals to have their passport applications processed.
“This is money we would have expected to send back home for the kids but these people took to corruption, which is rife here in South Africa,” said Thuthani Hadebe, who returned to Bulawayo from Johannesburg last month.
With schools now in their second week, there are concerns that children whose parents work in South Africa and have not paid tuition, could fail to catch up.
This is happening at a time when the government’s social assistance schemes that include the Basic Education Assistance Module (Beam) are failing to assist the intended beneficiaries with needy students being thrown out of school.
It was inevitable that parents illegally working in South Africa would fail to provide for their children considering the pressure they are under to regularise their stay, said a senior education officer in the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture stationed in Bulawayo.
“Many do not have formal jobs and their children are suffering here even though the father is said to be working in South Africa which many of us understand to be better off by our standards,” the officer said.
“The children are not being assisted in any way to continue with their education as fees have not been paid,” he said.
“We have always called for free education for primary school to avoid situations like these.”
For Timothy Sawu, what is happening now has been the reason for him to quit entertaining the whole idea of trekking to South Africa despite complaining about going for months without a salary.
“I think we must think about the children because now many of the children of people working in South Africa are suffering,” Sawu said.
“What happens if they continue failing to get proper papers? I will suffer here with my children,” he said, expressing what has become a common sentiment here.
Estimates put the number of Zimbabweans in South Africa at around three million with most of them having left behind their children with relatives.
