I was a foster parent for young refugees who came to Kent via the Channel, but were too old to live on their own.

One of them, a young boy from Afghanistan, saw his family killed in front of him. He told me: “The Taliban finished my family. But one day, maybe I can get married and start a new family of my own.” For him, nothing was more important than finding a place to call home.

For a boy living with such trauma, the Rwanda plan would have been devastating. Imagine thinking you had found a safe place where you could put down roots, only to learn you could be sent to another country, thousands of miles away, all because you had been unfortunate enough to take a dangerous journey?

Actually, I don’t have to imagine, because I know. I am a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Although I came to the United Kingdom by plane to live with my British in-laws, I was widowed and alone. I, too, know what it’s like to have your home taken from you and the importance of being secure enough to build another one.

If the treatment of refugees in Rwanda turns out to be less than advertised, how will they be able to speak out?

When I heard the Court of Appeal had ruled against the government, I was relieved for two reasons. Firstly, because no asylum seeker should live with the uncertainty of being sent on another long journey again, applying for asylum again, and as the judges noted  facing a real risk of being sent back to the country of persecution again. Worse yet, conscripted by your host government into armed groups destabilising the region as was the case of Burundian refugees in Rwanda.

Secondly, I was relieved, because the reality is that Rwanda is not a safe country for refugees. In 2017, when Israel tried a similar scheme, it was reported some of those deported to Rwanda were almost immediately expelled and pushed back into the arms of smugglers. In 2018, Rwandan police shot and killed 12 refugees protesting conditions. Even the accommodation supposed to house asylum seekers from the UK is tarnished with the repressive and cynical nature of the regime. Last year orphans of the Rwandan genocide were evicted from their hostel in order to make way for UK asylum seekers.

Reporters Without Borders call Rwanda’s media landscape “one of the poorest in Africa”  due to the levels of oppression. If the treatment of refugees in Rwanda turns out to be less than advertised, how will they be able to speak out?

According to the Home Office’s own estimates, the Rwanda plan would cost £196,000 per refugee deported. As someone who has experienced displacement and the icy grasp of oppressive regimes, I can tell you that the right to speak your mind and feel at home is worth more than that.

Although I have seen more horror and tragedy than most people encounter in their lifetime, in the UK I have thrived. I know this country is full of welcoming communities that can help other refugees do the same. I urge the government to accept the court’s decision, and focus on creating a more compassionate, fair and effective asylum system right here at home instead.

The Swedish Migration Court denied seven Cape Town soccer players travel documentation because their unabridged birth certificates do not contain their biological fathers` details. 

Getty Images. Seven teenage soccer players from Camps Bay FC could miss out on a trip to Sweden after the Nordic country denied them visas. The Swedish Migration Court denied them visas because their birth certificates do not have their biological fathers` details. The club appealed the denial at the Migration Court of Appeal and was again denied.

Seven teenagers who play for Camps Bay FC could miss out on competing in Sweden`s upcoming Gothia Cup youth soccer tournament after the government denied them visas. 

The Swedish Migration Court denied the players` travel documentation because their unabridged birth certificates do not contain their biological fathers` details. 

The club then appealed the decision at the Migration Court of Appeal, but learnt on Monday that the appeal had also been denied. 

Club chairperson Gina Isserow told News24 that the Swedish government required both parents` consent to grant the travel documents, which prejudiced seven teenagers born to and raised by single, unmarried mothers. 

Isserow said after the Migration Court`s decision, some mothers obtained affidavits from their children`s fathers consenting to the trip. 

The players are meant leave the country on Thursday for the tournament that will kick off on Saturday and return on 24 July. 

On 7 June, the club applied for an order with the Western Cape High Court which authorised the teenagers` trip to Sweden under the temporary guardianship of the club`s head coach, Mogamad Anees Abbas.

The court order included a teenager whose father is a foreign national who had absconded and was untraceable. 

The court ordered that the mothers had full parental rights and responsibilities to consent to their children`s travel.

It said:

The minor children are granted authorisation to travel to Sweden on 13 July and return to the Republic of South Africa on 24 July to participate in the Gothia Cup soccer tournament in Gothenburg. The biological mothers of the children have parental rights and responsibilities for obtaining all travel documents, including visas, and shall include their consent for their minor children to travel to Gothenburg, Sweden.

An appeal letter from the lawyers representing the teenagers addressed to the Swedish Embassy and Migration Court stated that, for children born out of wedlock, it was not compulsory for both parents to appear in a child`s birth certificate.

It said where the children`s best interests were concerned, the high court superseded the biological parent`s authority as the upper guardian of all minors.

Isserow said the teenagers play in the Under-13, Under-14 and Under-16 teams.

She said it was unfortunate that the seven could miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to represent South Africa abroad. 

`It is heartbreaking because none of these boys has ever been overseas, let alone represented South Africa overseas. We don`t know what to say to these kids. They have been training for 18 months. They worked hard and we`ve raised the funds. It`s not a matter of funding but an issue of the visas, even though we have a high court order,` said Isserow.

Camp`s Bay FC executive committee member Fiona Hart told News24 that this was not the first time the Swedish government had denied players visas.

She said the Club had exhausted all avenues for assistance without success and they would seek a permanent solution after this year`s tournament.

Hart said:

This happened last year as well, and we need this to be addressed because this is a tournament [the players] are invited to by Sweden. They need to find a way to not make it discriminatory for single mothers. We had to go to the high court and they still didn`t accept. We`ve lost all the flights and money [spent in preparation to get the players to Sweden], but it`s also about the children.

Immigration lawyer Gary Eisenberg said the visa denial may reflect the Swedish government`s distrust of South Africa`s judiciary.

`How do you punish a child with one parent? Maybe the one parent absconded and left the other to deal with the child, which is common in many countries. Their visa denial may reflect a jaundiced view of the Swedish government on South African high court orders.` 

Nombuso Mashangu, the mother of one of the teenagers, said she travelled to Johannesburg from Cape Town to clear the consent issue with her child`s father, who consented via an affidavit. 

Mashangu said she hoped the situation would change in favour of the teenagers, as her son `eats and breathes soccer`.

`These boys have been practicing and it would be disappointing if the others don`t go. I have been praying and I don`t know what it is, but I haven`t said to him `you`re not going`,` she said.

The gridlock affecting work-permit applications in South Africa is limiting expansion by German companies in the country and threatening operations that support 100 000 jobs, an industry association said.

While South Africa is taking steps to improve an approval system and make it easier and quicker to get permits, the snarl-up that was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic has limited the entry of skilled workers into a country that has a dire shortage of them. Between 2014 and 2021 only 25 298 skilled-worker permits were approved by the country, which has a population of 60 million. 

`The visa matter spans the entire hierarchy of German business in South Africa` ranging from chief executive officers to technicians, the Southern African-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry said on Thursday in a response to questions. `This is of course not only a concern to German business but also to the country itself` as German companies operating in South Africa provide jobs for 100 000 people along their supply chains, the chamber said. 

Companies operating in South Africa struggle to find skilled workers, a result of a dysfunctional education system and exacerbated by emigration. Volkswagen AG and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG operate factories in the country and the chamber has over 600 member companies. Andreas Peschke, Germany’s ambassador to South Africa, has previously estimated that German companies account for 10% of South Africa’s export income. 

Germany is South Africa’s third-biggest single-country trade partner after China and the US, with two-way movement exceeding $20 billion last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Companies not being able to get permits for executives at local subsidiaries is endangering investment and `the same goes for technicians not being able to enter the country, while at the same time there are no skilled workers available in South Africa to service machinery,` the chamber said. 

The group said that while there have been improvements this year, its members had more than 100 open work permit applications in the second half of last year. In one case it took about 18 months to get a permit for a managing director and the owners of one company sold up after their visa was rejected despite 30 years of doing business in the nation. 

The visa-approval process remains opaque and offers from the chamber to help improve the process and digitize it have not been responded to, the German chamber said. 

Siyabulela Qoza, a spokesman for the Department of Home Affairs, didn’t answer a call to his mobile phone or respond to a text message.

SA National Defence Force (SANDF) members deployed to the borders under “Operation Corona” have effected hundreds of arrests of suspected illegal immigrants and seized contraband including stolen vehicles and narcotics worth millions of rand.

The army, detailing its June successes, said in Mpumalanga, along the SA and Mozambique border, soldiers confiscated narcotics valued at R1,682,442 and contraband goods valued at R70,300. It said 205 undocumented persons were apprehended and 19 criminals were arrested.

Along the Free State border with Lesotho, six undocumented people  were apprehended, one criminal arrested, narcotics valued at R337,500 seized, a water truck worth R2m seized and contraband worth R19,000 confiscated.

Along the Eastern Cape border with Lesotho, one person was arrested, contraband worth R10,285 was confiscated and 159 undocumented persons were apprehended.

At the Limpopo border with Zimbabwe, 250 undocumented persons were arrested while stolen vehicles worth R400,000 were recovered and contraband worth R 529,767 confiscated.

Sandf members also recovered stolen stock worth about R252,200 and made two arrests.

At the KwaZulu-Natal borders with Mozambique and Eswatini, five undocumented persons were apprehended, three suspected of crimes were arrested, stolen vehicles worth R865,000 were recovered and narcotics valued at R2,313,596 seized. Contraband goods valued at more than R1m were confiscated.

Twelve undocumented persons were apprehended in Gauteng while three were nabbed at the North West border with Botswana. The Northern Cape border had the lowest number of incidents with only two undocumented people arrested, the statement said.

South Africa has begun taking steps to resolve what the presidency believes is the biggest impediment to growth after persistent blackouts: An acute shortage of skills. 

A raft of changes to simplify the rules governing the snarled up and byzantine work permit regime were submitted to the state legal adviser last week and are expected to be passed into law in coming months, said Saul Musker, director of strategy and delivery support in the South African Presidency.

Musker said that the adviser will consider them for a few weeks, they will then be put out for public comment for 30 days before being taken to parliament.

Companies operating in South Africa struggle to find skilled workers, a result of a dysfunctional education system exacerbated by emigration. Still, between 2014 and 2021 only 25,298 skilled work permit visas were approved, according to a report prepared for the presidency. More than half of applications were rejected on grounds including errors in the complex application process. 

“It’s harder to come to South Africa than almost any other country in the world despite the acute shortage of skills we have,” said Musker. “Investors are not able to grow their businesses in South Africa, or have their regional head offices here. It’s a huge and very real constraint to growth.”

A study cited in the report, prepared by a team working under the presidency headed by Mavuso Msimang, a former director general of the Department of Home Affairs, projects that a moderate increase in skilled migration could lift gross domestic product by 1.2%.

Points-Based

Eight recommendations in the study, which was released by the presidency in April, include a points-based system, where applicants who meet a minimum education and salary level would be granted work permits. 

Larger employers could be granted trusted employer status, which would allow them to assess qualifications of workers they bring in without having to subject them to arduous state verification process. New permit categories to ease the entry of remote workers and those working for startups should also be created.

Ultimately, work permit applications may be able to be made and tracked online instead of through the submission of documents to embassies in what then becomes largely a manual process.

The difficulty in getting work permits “definitely is one of the areas of discussion between business leaders and the authorities,” said Kuseni Dlamini, chairman of Massmart Holdings Ltd., a unit of Walmart Inc., and a board member of the American Chamber of Commerce in South Africa. “We hear a lot of encouraging and promising pronouncements, but there is a disconnection between the pronouncements and the operations of the system,” he said.

Other measures proposed include streamlining the documentation process and the adjudication of those documents, boosting the capacity of the department and improving the quality of its computer systems, which currently connect to the Internet at one sixtieth of the speed of an average system in a bank. 

Current requirements, which include having to submit qualifications to the South African Qualifications Authority in a time-consuming process and often having to prove that a South African cannot be found for the job, have frustrated applicants and potential employers and resulted in a massive backlog of applications. 

Busi Mavuso, the chief executive officer of lobby group Business Leadership South Africa, in an interview earlier this year cited frustrations from foreign companies unable to get directors into the country and complaints to her organization from the French South African Chamber of Commerce that their members had received no response to work permit applications.

“One big impairment that we’ve been talking about for quite some time is the work visas,” she said. “It has been a problem. It continues to be a problem.”

Some changes have already been made, including doing away with the need for radiological reports to prove an applicant doesn’t have tuberculosis and limiting the need for police clearances from the countries where an applicant has lived to the last five years. 

Until recently applicants for a critical skills visa would need to meet 22 requirements. While processing a work visa in South Africa can take 48 weeks or more the process in Kenya is a maximum of 12 weeks and just eight weeks in Nigeria, according to the report submitted by Msimang’s team. 

South Africa’s skills shortage has been created through a work permit system that wasn’t designed for a skills-scarce country and a hostility toward foreign workers, a possible result of the high number of undocumented migrants in the country and one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, according to Musker and Msimang.

“I found a lot of protectionism,” Msimang said in an interview. “The lamentable statistics that you talk about in terms of visas that were approved really had to do with this hostile attitude toward the utilization of foreigners’ skills.”

This, despite the fact that research cited in Msimang’s report found that each skilled employee can create more than one job for lesser skilled workers, as well as boosting productivity and competitiveness and adding to tax revenue.

“What appear to be excessive security concerns and onerous administrative processes unduly delay and sometimes even prevent the admittance of legitimate, crucially needed immigrants,” the team said in the report.