Influx From Zimbabwe to South Africa Tests Both

Benedicte Kurzen/EVE

At the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather each evening for prayer. South Africa’s services have been severely strained.

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: June 23, 2007

JOHANNESBURG, June 22 — As Zimbabwe’s disintegration gathers potentially unstoppable momentum, a swelling tide of migrants is moving into neighboring South Africa, driven into exile by oppression, unemployment and inflation so relentless that many goods now double in price weekly.

South Africa is deporting an average of 3,900 illegal Zimbabwean migrants every week, the International Organization for Migration says. That is up more than 40 percent from the second half of 2006, and six times the number South African officials said they were expelling in late 2003.

And that reflects only those who are captured. Many more Zimbabweans slip into the country undetected, although estimates vary wildly. In a nation of 46 million, most experts say, undocumented Zimbabweans could number several hundred thousand to two million.

Social tensions are ratcheting up in both nations, as Zimbabwe’s adult population dwindles and South Africans, already burdened by high unemployment, face new competition for jobs and housing. The migrants also pose a diplomatic problem, because South Africa is trying to broker an end to Zimbabwe’s long political crisis without criticizing its government or appearing to have a major stake in the outcome.

The situation is inflicting ever more misery on the Zimbabweans. The vast majority flee their country’s penury to find a way to support their families back home. But in South Africa they often find xenophobia, exploitation and a government unwilling and ill-equipped to help them.

“There’s a lot of competition” with South Africans “for other resources like housing in informal settlements, access to limited primary health care and education,” said Chris Maroleng, an expert on Zimbabwe at the Institute for Security Studies, a research organization in Pretoria.

South Africa’s government already struggles to provide free housing, medical care and employment for its own poorest, including the millions living in shantytowns. Here, where joblessness runs from 25 to 40 percent of adult workers, the Zimbabweans — now the nation’s largest migrant group — are increasingly seen as intruders, not victims, and clashes between the groups are not uncommon.

Unquestionably, the Zimbabweans are victims first. A rising number claim to be refugees from persecution by President Robert G. Mugabe’s police and by supporters of his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Just six Zimbabweans sought political asylum in South Africa in 2001; last year, the total was nearly 19,000, more than a third of all asylum applications in South Africa.

But most are fleeing privation, not persecution. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was officially 4,530 percent in May; economists say it is at least twice that. Industries are operating at barely 30 percent of capacity, unemployment exceeds 80 percent and a disastrous harvest is likely to leave up to four million in need of food aid this year.

A memorandum prepared by 34 international aid agencies, including the United Nations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, predicted this month that the country’s economy would cease to function by the end of this year.

Remittances keep the economy afloat: half of all households get most of their money from distant friends and relatives, a Global Poverty Research survey concluded last June. More than one in five of those who sent money lived in South Africa, the most of any nation except Britain.

Magugu Nyathi arrived in Johannesburg two and a half years ago and found work as a journalist for a Zimbabwe news organization. Her aunt, an office worker in Bulawayo, earns 400,000 Zimbabwe dollars a month — about $9, until the Zimbabwe dollar plummeted this week.

Now the aunt’s monthly salary is worth about $2. She survives in part on a stipend from Ms. Nyathi.

“There are families who don’t have a kid outside the country,” said Ms. Nyathi, who lives in Cape Town. “How are they surviving? Just think of it.”

Ms. Nyathi is lucky as migrants go: she has a skill and has obtained a temporary permit that allows her to remain legally in South Africa while her application for asylum is processed. Because Zimbabwe was long one of the best-educated nations in Africa, a share of migrants — particularly teachers, who have often been targets of harassment by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters — stand a good chance of finding work in South Africa, legally or not.

Johannesburg’s government said this week that 8 in 10 people who had visited a new office for migrant assistance were Zimbabwean, and that the visitors included mathematicians, geologists, engineers and experts in computers and aviation.

But skills are no guarantee of employment. At the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather every evening, waiting for the doors to open so they can spend the night. They occupy several floors of the building, from the foyer to stairwells and meeting rooms.

“Some of the people we have in this building are amazing,” said the Rev. Paul Verryn, the Methodist bishop of Johannesburg. “We have a doctor, two accountants, teachers, a health inspector — all sleeping on the floor.”

Even qualified migrants find it hard to get jobs without work permits or temporary permits that allow migrants to stay while they apply for asylum.

The permits are issued only in a handful of offices, and only at limited times. The Home Affairs Ministry, which regulates immigration, is frequently accused by Zimbabweans and advocacy groups of deliberately withholding permits, perhaps to force them to return home. More likely, it is simply overwhelmed: in Pretoria, for example, refugees often sleep on the streets outside the office to be the first of hundreds and even thousands who line up to apply for asylum.

Those who apply for asylum wait years for a decision, as officials tackle a vast backlog. Last year, as nearly 19,000 Zimbabwean applications for asylum flooded in, Home Affairs processed fewer than 2,000 requests from past years and granted asylum to a mere 103 people.

The growing crush of applicants presents the government with a delicate problem. During his seven years in office, President Thabo Mbeki has studiously avoided criticizing Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, and is trying to present himself as an impartial broker in negotiations between Mr. Mugabe and opposition politicians to lay the groundwork for a presidential election next year.

When a leading opposition politician, Roy Bennett, fled Zimbabwe last year under threat of arrest, his application for political asylum was denied because the South African government decided that his claims of persecution were not founded. Mr. Bennett’s farm had been seized by the government, he had been imprisoned for a year for shoving a member of Parliament and he had been accused by the Zimbabwe police of plotting to murder Mr. Mugabe.

Mr. Bennett eventually won asylum, but only after going to court.

“The problem in giving someone asylum is that you have to make a statement about the country that individual is fleeing,” said Mr. Maroleng, at the Pretoria institute. “Politically, it raises questions, and it undermines the government’s policy on Zimbabwe, which is not to engage the government of Zimbabwe” on questions of repression and misrule.

So migrants wait for a chance at legal residence that may never arrive. On Thursday, a schoolteacher and union official from Harare used his Zimbabwe civil-service passport to walk across the border in Beitbridge and make his way to Johannesburg.

The teacher, who insisted on anonymity, said he had left his wife and two children behind because he was living in fear. He had been arrested and beaten after joining a union march in September, he said. “As we go forward toward elections in 2008,” he said, “we are again targets of violence. Every morning, my life was very much in danger.”

But he might have stayed, he said, had his monthly salary not been the equivalent of $15.

Another teacher, a friend, had fled Zimbabwe last year after government spies mistook a wake in her parlor for a meeting of opposition members, and set fire to her house, she said.

“You don’t feel the pain on somebody when it’s not happening to you,” she said in a Johannesburg clinic for migrants seeking legal advice. “I never expected such a life. But I think there’s a reason why God wants this.”

But for the moment, she said: “I just want a job. I can do dishes. I don’t mind that I was a teacher.”