Shake up of SA’s refugee system is a non-starter

When planning where to put a refugee reception office, what are the things you consider? Probably not climate and architecture. It should likely be something along the lines of where refugees enter the country.

So, you decide to place it in Tshwane which is 200km from any national border, in a province so landlocked that the provinces neighbouring it are landlocked too and obviously over an hour away from the airport. That’s where you should put the refugee reception office. After all, these crafty refugees have invested in teleportation.

Refugee reception office

Maybe somebody was thinking that a capital city should have a refugee reception office and even though Bloemfontein is closer to an international border given its proximity to Lesotho, we just want to show Bloemfontein how much disdain we have for it so we’ll pick the worst possible location.

Ha! Take that Bloemfontein! You don’t get to welcome the refugees!

It may be understandable from the days when asylum seekers had to physically present themselves to renew their permits every six months but that system ended half a decade ago. Now it’s online and has been since 2021. And in the delayed fashion we have come to love about South African decision making, we now have movement on terminating the Tshwane Refugee Reception Office. If ever there was an opportunity to say, duh, this is it.

The actual question is why asylum seekers would need six-month extensions in the first place. Isn’t six months enough to process an application? We need to either improve our capacity to handle applications or stop taking so many of them. It’s not fair to anybody to set somebody up for potential deportation five years down the line after they’ve started a life here. Granting somebody asylum isn’t a can you can kick down the road.

It doesn’t look like improving capacity is on the cards so the new gazetted moves seem to be ones to bottleneck applications. Closing the Tshwane Refugee Reception Office… oh no… where will all these asylum seekers teleport to now? On reading the government gazette, it appears that the intention is to have all asylum seekers coming through the northern borders, report to Beitbridge.

That seems like it will be severely more inconvenient to those asylum seekers coming from southern Botswana but I’m not convinced that’s ever been the target market.

It would be interesting to read the submissions as the gazette has only painted an intention which is open for comment for a month. It’s great to see that the Department of Home Affairs is addressing some shortcoming in the refugee system, or at least trying to.

Home Affairs inefficiency

It doesn’t necessarily address the really big one: why does it take years to deal with an application?

Where you put the reception office won’t matter that much if the reception office is the start of a process that would take as much time as it would take to birth a child and raise them to their teens.

A grocery store doesn’t discover it has accidentally left apples on the shelf for 10 years and fix the problem by closing the store and opening another one where they take those 10-year-old apples and put them back on the shelves not to check them again for a couple more years.

Since process works hand in hand with the physicality of the infrastructure, changing the physicality isn’t the full solution. It may be part of a solution but we’d need more insight into what the whole solution will look like.

There’s something exciting about seeing some action taken to address issues, especially issues that are serious and impact lives. It’s quite another thing to see those actions have the desired effect.

Will moving the reception office to a more suitable location work? On its own, probably not. Is it part of a bigger solution? Only the Department of Home Affairs knows. Is it a step towards what may be a workable solution? Time will tell!