Fear and confusion rife among foreign nationals about accessing Covid jab in South Africa

Daily Maverick 22 September 2021

Foreign nationals living in SA who have some form of identification are eligible for vaccination against Covid-19. But confusion is rife, even among healthcare workers — and some migrants say they won’t get vaccinated for fear of deportation. Meanwhile, the question of how to register those without identity documents lingers.

Simon*, 42, is a Malawian national who works as a caretaker in Sea Point in Cape Town. At his age, he has been eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine for some time. He told Daily Maverick, however, that he won’t be queuing for his jab in the foreseeable future — for one very specific reason.

“I don’t have papers,” Simon said. “If they see this, maybe I can be sent back to Malawi.”

By “papers”, Simon meant that he lacks the legal right to live and work in South Africa. But he does have a passport — a Malawian one — which is all he technically requires to be vaccinated.

Although confusion is widespread on this point, Dr Nicholas Crisp — the head of the government’s vaccine programme — clarified the situation to Daily Maverick on Monday: all foreign nationals over 18 are eligible for free vaccination in South Africa as long as they have some form of identification. This could be a passport from any country, an ID book, refugee or asylum-seeker papers, and so on.

The requirement of a form of registration, Department of Health spokesperson Popo Maja has previously said, is to be able to track anyone who experiences adverse effects from any of the vaccines.

But Simon’s fears appear to be widespread.

Vinayak Bhardwaj, the regional migrant referent for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told Daily Maverick that fear of deportation is a barrier to seeking vaccination.

“Speaking to migrants themselves, we have heard some express fear of getting vaccinated as they have expired passports which they’ve been unable to renew due to Covid,” Bhardwaj said.

In reality, any information gathered during Covid-19 testing or vaccination cannot lawfully be used to police immigration.

“Healthcare workers should not be expected to be immigration enforcement officers,” Sally Gandar, the Scalabrini Centre’s head of advocacy, told Daily Maverick.

“The information provided is for health-related reasons, and should not be shared with other departments.”

Gandar says that the information gathered is supposed to be kept confidential and password-protected. Sharing the information with the Department of Home Affairs for immigration enforcement purposes would violate the privacy of the patient, which would be unlawful.

She adds that the Scalabrini Centre, which supports migrants in South Africa, is fielding constant queries from non-citizens expressing confusion about whether they are entitled to register for vaccinations.

“We have also received reports where people have been refused the vaccine based on their documentation type. This indicates that there is also a need to provide communication targeting healthcare workers, so that they too know that non-citizens are eligible for the vaccine, and should be assisted to receive it,” Gandar says.

It is also possible that some non-citizens are being denied vaccination for xenophobic reasons. In June, NGOs including the Jesuit Refugee Service released a statement drawing attention to the fact that at certain healthcare facilities in Gauteng, migrants were being charged for basic healthcare services they are entitled to receive free in terms of the Constitution.

The University of the Witwatersrand’s Professor Francois Venter told Daily Maverick that in inner-city Johannesburg, “Everyday experience of xenophobia — especially at the hospitals — is routine to the point of being institutionalised. Foreigners are turned away by security guards and clerks, illegally, long before they see a health worker.”

Venter added that given the police’s reputation for clampdowns and extortion, “any ‘come and get vaccinated, foreigner’ message may well get met with justifiable nervousness”.

With an estimated three million foreign nationals in South Africa, and many more South Africans lacking any form of identification, some are asking whether enforcing the vaccination ID requirements is worth it in the vital quest to achieve herd immunity.

MSF’s Bhardwaj says only the Department of Health, which has a full view of the vaccine programme, can determine whether “the marginal benefit of recording accurately who got what [vaccine]” would outweigh “the urgent need to avoid a fourth wave of Covid-19 which would devastate our significantly depleted human resources for health”.     

Crisp told Daily Maverick that vaccine authorities are “busy with a solution” for registering undocumented individuals, which should be available by 10 October.

In the meantime, it appears that many vaccine sites are finding workarounds to the problem of registering those without any identity documents. The Western Cape government has already made provision for vaccinating undocumented people using a paper-based registration form. In Gauteng, some sites have permitted people to register using a police affidavit.

Health experts contacted by Daily Maverick were in unanimous agreement that vaccine-related communication from the government had not been clear enough.

“We don’t think any of the Covid-19 vaccine-related communication has been adequate, even for South Africans,” Bhardwaj said.

“What we are seeing in [MSF’s] support for the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out here in Khayelitsha, Western Cape is that there are not even the most basic information and education materials available to counter the deluge of disinformation out there. 

“What we also see, though — encouragingly — is that with some engagement and willingness to engage concerns, vaccine registrations effectively double.”

www.samigration.com

 

South Africa’s vaccine passport: Have jab, can travel, except to the UK and US

Daily Maverick  - 18 September 2021

Anger as United Kingdom keeps South Africa on red status despite government lobbying.

Britain’s decision to leave South Africa on its Covid-19 red list of countries from which citizens may not enter the UK – while removing eight other countries from the list – has caused outrage.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps announced on Friday night that his government was removing Turkey, Pakistan, the Maldives, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Oman, Bangladesh and Kenya from the list and simplifying procedures for foreigners to enter. But SA stayed on the list despite furious campaigning by Pretoria and business to get it off.

David Frost, CEO of Satsa, who has been leading the campaign, told DM168 on Friday that Shapps’ decision was “scandalous and completely unacceptable”. Frost said the decision was based on obsolete Covid-19 infection data and bad interpretation of the science.

He said Shapps seemed to have based his decision on his well-known insistence that the Beta variant largely emanates from South Africa, which was anachronistic information dating from last December.

“We would want to know how Kenya was taken off the list. We know their genomic sequencing is just about nonexistent compared to ours. We do the good science,” Frost said, adding that he believed South Africa was unfairly paying the price for that science.

Elsewhere Covid-19 vaccinations are becoming health passports for South African tourists to other holiday destinations such as France, Germany, Switzerland and Greece. But the UK – the biggest source of inbound tourists – and the US remain shut to South African tourists and their own returning nationals. Britons who travel to SA have to endure 10 days of quarantine on their return, which has effectively killed the market, and is costing SA about R26-million a day, the tourist industry says.

The loss of British tourism has already cost SA R2.4-billion in lost revenue since it was put on the list in May, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. The UK has traditionally been SA’s biggest source market for tourists. More than 430,000 British travellers arrived in SA in 2019.  During the complete shutdown of international travel from April to December 2020, UK arrivals dropped by 97%.

International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor joined in the campaign to persuade Britain to take SA off the red list. This week she raised the issue again with the new British Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss at a closed online meeting of Commonwealth foreign ministers, said Pandor’s spokesperson, Lunga Ngqengelele.

“She raises it at every opportunity,” he said. The minister did this on behalf of SA and the many other African countries on the red list.

Pandor told Radio 702 this week: “South Africa has made good progress through the third wave and its health system has shown that it is able to cope with the challenge. We are relaying this to our counterparts in the UK and we hope that very soon sense will prevail.

“South Africa is a major destination for tourists from the UK and for tourists from South Africa to the UK. I think there is a lot of protest arriving at the table of the Prime Minister as well as the Secretary of State,” Pandor added.

Frost told DM168 that SA is being punished in part because its good Covid-19 scientists made discoveries that are not being properly interpreted to the world. He is furious about reports that SA could become a Covid-19 “mutation factory”. The reports arise from the work of bioinformatics professor Tulio de Oliveira, who runs gene-sequencing programmes at two South African universities.

He told an immunology conference on 30 August that South Africa’s 8.2 million HIV-positive people were immune-compromised and therefore able to harbour the coronavirus for longer, allowing it to mutate as it reproduced.

“You have this massive virus evolution, really the virus accumulating over 30 mutations,” De Oliveira was quoted as saying. Frost said this message was amplified in the UK and elsewhere and was being taken up by British “hawks” trying to keep SA on the red list. He believes that many uncontextualised interpretations of the scientific position in SA are being used against the country.

The evidence clearly points to South Africa being removed from the red list. If the UK government wants to retain the integrity of its traffic light system, it must reward countries which empirically demonstrate they are safe by granting them amber status.

He noted that the UK imposed its outright ban on SA in December after SA had detected the Beta variant of Covid-19, as though that was about to take over the world. Since then, the Delta variant has completely overtaken the Beta variant and is also dominant in the UK.

Frost pointed out that SA’s average number of daily new Covid-19 infections had halved over the past two weeks. Its infection rate is less than a quarter of the UK’s and lower than most EU countries on the UK’s amber list (which allows entry to tourists but with quarantines).

Frost said calls were mounting in the UK for South Africa to be removed from the list. For example, in the Independent, in a joint statement on behalf of the South African tourism industry, Ben Bradshaw MP, Lord Oates and Baroness Chalker said: “The evidence clearly points to South Africa being removed from the red list. If the UK government wants to retain the integrity of its traffic light system, it must reward countries which empirically demonstrate they are safe by granting them amber status.”

Frost noted that aggressive lobbying, in a big  government campaign, got India off the list. The South African government, in tandem with business organisations like his and Business Leadership South Africa, had gone in to bat for SA, but much more was needed.

The UK and US increasingly look out of step as other tourist destinations rapidly open up to vaccinated South Africans. France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Spain and Greece are among European countries that recently dropped quarantine requirements and opened their doors to South African tourists who have been vaccinated. Others are expected to follow soon.

Yet China, Russia, India, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Turkey and others are allowing entry to South African tourists only if they endure long and often expensive quarantine periods.

A South African woman who holds a British passport and had to return to the UK to visit her elderly mother described the costs, inconvenience and confusion of navigating the UK’s Covid-19 regulations and restrictions.

She had to book a package in advance that included  10 nights in a quarantine hotel, with three meals a day, and two PCR tests, for a total of about R35,000. The price was fixed and she had no choice of hotel. When she arrived at Heathrow Airport she and the other travellers from SA were directed to Terminal 5, which was dedicated to processing arrivals from red list countries. From there the travellers were entirely in the hands of officials who transported them to their hotels and kept them under effective guard there.

Their meals were brought to their rooms, which they could not leave, apart from short periods of exercise in the hotel parking lot. If they needed to leave their rooms for any other reason, they could only do so with permission – and under guard.

The United States is also still barring entry of South African tourists, though other categories of traveller may be permitted if the US deems this to be “in the national interest”. South Africa is on a list of 33 forbidden source countries, which includes all those in Europe’s Schengen area, as well as the UK, Ireland, Brazil, China, India and Iran.

Numbers of tourists moving between South Africa and those European countries opening up to vaccinated South Africans have slowly started to pick up, according to a Johannesburg-based travel agent.

And some South African tourists visiting those countries are using them as a back door to other European members of the Schengen visa regime that are not yet open to South Africans, like the Netherlands and Italy, diplomatic sources told DM168. This is because no immigration restrictions apply between Schengen countries.

The Johannesburg travel agent said that Schengen-area immigration officials were starting to get wise to this and demanding proof of the departure country of travellers across Schengen borders.

A diplomatic source said that South Africans travelling to France should also take care to register for the Passe Sanitaire, which certifies their vaccination status and is required for entry to restaurants, planes and regional trains, as well as all venues accommodating 50 people or more. This pass is an App with a QR code.

Other European countries have equivalents.

The agent also pointed out the hazards that shifting red list restrictions presented to travellers to destinations such as the UK. Some travellers are choosing to do their quarantines in other countries, such as in Ireland, before entering the UK. The Johannesburg travel agent told DM168 that, because of the uncertainties and variations of travel to Europe, many South Africans are instead choosing to holiday in Africa. Egypt requires only a recent negative Covid-19 PCR test, as do most countries closer to home, such as Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Eswatini, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

This week the Seychelles took South Africa off its restricted list, meaning South Africans may visit the archipelago with only a recent negative PCR test certificate. Mauritius will take South Africa off its restricted list on 1 October. Vaccinated travellers will be allowed to roam freely across the island immediately. Those without vaccinations will still have to undergo quarantine in an official quarantine hotel for 14 days.

www.samigration.com

 

More bank branches to offer Home Affairs services in South Africa

News24 -  September 2021

The Department of Home Affairs plans to expand its partnership with banks to offer more services at branches across the country.

In a presentation to parliament on Tuesday (31 August), the department said that there are currently 27 bank branches that offer E-Home Affairs services across six different provinces.

The department said it plans to roll out these services to a further 43 sites in the near future.

“This initiative was done mainly to assist with the reduction of long queues at DHA offices and to expand the service platforms and allow citizens to apply for Smart ID cards and passports online.

“Applicants are only required to visit the bank branch to complete the biometrics, thereby reducing the time spent in the bank or DHA office.”

The department said that the rollout of pilot sites will be completed as soon as possible as this has been outstanding for a number of years.

All of South Africa’s biggest banks – with the exception of Capitec – offer the E-Home Affairs service at a handful of their branches.

Absa, FNB, Nedbank, and Standard Bank have had multiple branches supporting the service for several years. Discovery Bank and Investec Bank recently started participating in the programme with one branch each.

The tables below show all of the bank branches where you can book appointments to capture biometric data for your smart ID and passport application, and collect your documents when they are ready.

www.samigration.com

Home Affairs offices open over the weekend

Enca - 17 September 2021

Long queues and systems that are constantly offline have long plagued Home Affairs offices. It's affected many people. Home Affairs says it will be using this weekend to resolve issues just like these. Reporter Mawande Kheswa has more. Courtesy #DStv403

There are over 400,000 uncollected IDs at Home Affairs offices nationwide.

For those without these documents, there will be no way to register to vote this weekend.

Home Affairs offices will be open this weekend from 8am to 5pm to help.

“We are going to be open over the weekend so that all those who want to come and collect their ID’s they can be able to do so," said Njabulo Nzuza, Deputy Home Affairs Minister.

"Those who want to have their temporary Identity documents can also come through. Those who are having extreme case issues where they need certain things fixed on their ID’s can also come through to resolve those errors where you have duplicates and so on."

www.samigration.com

National Register of Artisans now in effect

   Hi artisan,

Applying for critical skills work visa in South Africa as an artisan has been a challenge for the longest time. In 2014 when the current amendments to the Immigration Act were gazetted several gaps were identified in the Act which included the absence of a SAQA accredited professional body to register artisans. ECSA was not an option due to their minimum NQF criteria of 5 which was a notch above the rating being given by SAQA for artisans.  There was a time letters issued by the National Artisan Moderation Body, (NAMB), were sufficient and then they were not. There was a time when registration with the South African Institute of Draughting was good enough and then it wasn’t. The latest dispensation saw applications being rejected because Home Affairs required a South African trade test.  This of course is absurd for two reasons; the artisan is already trade tested and secondly a South African  

This inconsistency was a direct result of the absence of a key legislative instrument, namely the National Register of Artisans.  In terms section 26C of the Skills Development Act 97 of 1998 as amended, the Minister of Higher Education is required to establish a register of artisans.  This register unfortunately could not be implemented as the regulations were not yet in place to establish this register, therefore the NAMB letters were acceptable as they pointed to the absence of the National Register of Artisans.  In the absence of a clear framework on how to recognize foreign artisans in the republic it meant that the Department of Home Affairs was left to its own devices hence the constant changes in approach.

Fortunately, that gap has now been closed and a clear process of registering artisans is now in place.   The National Register of Artisans Regulations was gazetted the 19th of March 2021 and provides a framework for the registration of all artisans, local and foreign. There 4 categories of artisans, Practicing Artisans, Non – Practicing, Foreign Practicing and Foreign Non-Practicing Artisans.  Under regulation 3 it is mandatory for all artisans to register with the Department of Higher Educations National Artisan Development Support Centre (NADSC). 

The registration requirements for foreign National Practicing Artisans are the following, a certified passport copy, evidence of legal visa for entrance into the country, certified copy of trade test whether conducted locally or abroad, SAQA evaluation of foreign trade test, proof of address and proof of previous registration for a renewal.

Importantly regulation 6 has some consequences for visa applications by artisans.  6.5 Provides that all foreign national artisans must register with DHET before applying for critical skills work visa or any work visa with DHA. 6.6 goes on to state that foreign national artisans will not be granted critical skills work by DHA if they are not registered with DHET. This means that as of 19th March 2021 it became impossible for an artisan to get a visa without first registering the NADSC