No Joy For Zimbabweans Living & Working In South Africa

A top South African government official has said Zimbabweans need to be in their home country and “all countries need to take responsibility for their citizens.”

Speaking during a discussion on the ANC’s policy documents on Monday, the party’s international relations subcommittee chairperson Lindiwe Zulu said South Africa can no longer take care of other countries’ citizens because its economy is also not doing well.

She also dismissed the argument that sending Zimbabweans back to their country was unfair saying:

 Lindiwe Zulu

When it comes to the issue of Home Affairs, and you were saying maybe we are sending Zimbabweans back to starve, as the African National Congress we believe that all countries need to take responsibility of their citizens. First and foremost, we take responsibility of our citizens, we make sure that despite the challenges that we have of poverty, unemployment and inequality, we shouldn’t be having South Africans leaving South Africa with almost nothing, leaving South Africa and going to neighbouring countries to go and look for greener pastures when they aren’t even that much of the greener pastures that we can talk about.

She said there are ongoing discussions between South Africa’s ANC and Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF. Lindiwe Zulu said in those discussions of the two parties, ANC urged Zanu-PF to create a conducive economic environment for Zimbabweans so they do not have to leave their country for South Africa.

Zulu said:

So in our discussions with Zanu PF, we continue to engage with that to say let us all collectively create conducive environments for our people, so that when we have these people-to-people relationships. It’s going to be people to people without others feeling like they are being pinched, without feeling like we’ve got too many Zimbabweans here in the country, they should be in their home. We need other countries to help us deal with the issue of immigration and immigrants. 

We need them to also appreciate that we are also under extreme pressure, because the economy of our country is also not doing very well.