Inhumane. This is how JP Smith of the City of Cape Town described Home Affairs' treatment of people at a refugee centre.
|||Cape Town - Inhumane, disastrous and frankly, disgusting. This is how JP Smith, mayoral committee member for Safety and Security has described Home Affairs’ management of the refugee reception centre on the Foreshore.
Smith slammed the department after chaos erupted on Monday when security guards hosed down angry people, including children, when they became unruly outside the centre.
“If you come to pay your bills at a city office, would you be expected to queue on a pavement in the rain for hours on end?
“Would you be expected to defecate on the pavement, because there are no toilets available? It is a reception area, when one ‘receives’ a guest to provide a service to them, this is not how they should be treated,” Smith said on Tuesday morning.
Some of the refugees have been queueing every day since last Monday to renew their asylum seeker’s documents, which allow an asylum seeker to live and work in South Africa on a temporary basis.
On Monday, when the gates were opened and a frustrated crowd of about 1 000 people surged into the building, Mafoko Security staff, contracted by Home Affairs, turned the fire hose on them.
Mustapha Mohammed, a Ghanaian barber who runs a salon in Christiane in North West Province, said: “I have travelled from North West Province, and expected to have my document renewed within a day or two. Now it has been almost two weeks, and my money has run out.
“At night I am sleeping right here on the ground by the refugee centre because I don’t know anyone in Cape Town.”
He said he had to renew his documents in Cape Town because it was his port of entry.
Delays in the centre’s renewal of asylum seeker documents have seen the build-up of a processing backlog.
Many people said their “appointments” made on previous days had been nullified each morning with the arrival of more immigrants starting new queues.
The city had warned Home Affairs of the potential for in a meeting convened by the mayor’s office three months ago. The department had apparently assured the city that everything was under control.
Home Affairs’ provincial manager Yusuf Simons explained that the department “has scheduled more interviews to finalise their outstanding applications” and that this caused an extra influx of people since late last week.
However, Simons said that the reception centre was indeed “doing its best” in the light of serious capacity constraints. He said the centre’s lease for a much larger building in Maitland had been terminated in June last year. The building in Customs House on the Foreshore was a temporary reception centre which was small and not sufficient.
Simons said that extra portable toilets had been brought in this month, bringing the total to 20; clean water had been provided and staff had been assisting people since 6am to absorb the backlog.
However, both the city’s JP Smith and Braam Hanekom, director of refugee rights NGO People Against Suffering Oppression and Poverty (Passop), have rubbished the department’s explanation.
“The department’s excuses are neither here nor there... the department knows how many people they can expect on a given day (because they have records of scheduled interviews and dates when documents expired in their database). If they do not secure the resources, staff and capacity to deal with a predictable influx – the blame for the current situation lies with them,” said Hanekom.
Smith has said that the large queues have resulted in higher crime in the area and health and humanitarian hazards for those who feel compelled to keep their position in the queues for hours, or overnight.
Hanekom warned of the negative effects these delays had on immigrants’ lives.
Inko Mbumu Pericles from the DRC said: “I have been waiting for days and now my document has expired. I can be arrested by police at any moment, and do you think they care about your excuses before they throw you into the back of the van? The office also wants to fine R2 500 you if you come to them with an expired document.”
Cape Argus