Department of international relations and co-operation (Dirco) spokesperson Chrispin Phiri has announced that South Africa will start charging other countries for the deportation of their nationals.
Moving forward, we will be billing countries for foreign nationals who will have to be deported or who are in our criminal detention facilities and have to be deported back to their own countries.
— Chrispin Phiri, Dirco spokesperson
Governments across African countries, including Ghana, Malawi and Mozambique, have initiated voluntary repatriation efforts to bring their own nationals to their home countries from South Africa, citing xenophobic attacks in South Africa.
The first country to embark on the mass evacuation was Ghana. About 1,000 Ghanaians have been evacuated through different charter flights from the OR Tambo International Airport to Accra. Following that, other African countries also started making efforts to repatriate their own citizens with their own government funding.
Phiri noted that these state-funded evacuations prove foreign governments have the logistical capacity to transport their citizens, saying the same responsibility should apply to deport their nationals who are in South Africa illegally or held in prisons.
“What we have also noted through the department of home affairs is it does seem there’s capacity to repatriate nationals,” Phiri said in an interview with SABC.
“We believe this creates a good mechanism for us to have a structured relationship. Moving forward, we will be billing countries for foreign nationals who will have to be deported or who are in our criminal detention facilities and have to be deported back to their own countries.
“We can see that there’s capacity for countries to extract foreign nationals who have fallen foul of the law, and that’s something through the department of home affairs we will pursue as the government.”
The department of home affairs recently revealed that it costs more than R60m each year to deport foreign nationals by road. Costs to fly them out to their country of origin can go up to about R5m for one chartered flight. The department of correctional services spends about R11m per day to house about 24,000 foreign national inmates in correctional services facilities.
“We also have a number of foreign nationals in our detention facilities and deportation facilities who have violated the law and are due for deportation,” Phiri said, emphasising why other nations must shoulder these expenses.
There has been a widespread outbreak of anti-illegal immigrant protests in different parts of the country led by civic groups such as the March and March Movement. Two Mozambican nationals were killed during the attacks.
TimesLIVE
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