Planning for return of our citizens from South Africa

President E.D. Mnangagwa

In June, exemption permits which allowed our nationals a lawful stay in South Africa will expire.

This means all holders of these Zimbabwe Exemption Permits, better known as ZEPs, will have to be home by then. We are preparing for their return, and to warmly welcome them once they step on home soil. We will do so fully confident that their return and re-integration into their families and communities, and with relatives and friends will be smooth. Government will assist them as they prepare to resume a productive life as full citizens back in the land of their birth.

Our citizens have been highly productive

All told, we expect 178 412 nationals, including their families and dependants. Through our Embassy in South Africa, Government has provided a portal for them to register so their whereabouts and needs are known in anticipation of the repatriation exercise. Some have been away from home for quite a while and, until now, had set base in South Africa.

The ZEP allowed Zimbabweans to lawfully remain in the sister Republic of South Africa in order to pursue their education, to work or set up businesses. With a strong educational foundation and largely highly skilled in different trades and disciplines, our nationals have been active across a wide spectrum of the South African economy. They will not be hard-pressed for options.

They have helped lift our region

Even in the diaspora, their contributions back home have been salutary and impactful. Many have built new homes in towns and cities, and modernised and invested in family homes in rural areas. In South Africa itself, their contribution to the host economy has been outstanding. I get many reports from the South African leadership, both in Government and in business, which describe their contribution to different sectors of the South African economy in flattering superlatives. These complimentary reports continue to fill me with great pride and joy. Our citizens have been instrumental in plugging skills gaps in our SADC region, and have acquitted themselves exceptionally well, thus, holding our flag high.

They have been a true sample of Zimbabwe’s legendary industry, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and honesty.

They have homes to

come back to

Like I have already said, they never broke links with home and country. Although away from us physically most of the times, they have always been with and amongst us, most strikingly through their families. They have always fully participated in the affairs of their families, playing a big part in fending for them, in enhancing livelihoods, in financing education of siblings and relatives, and in contributing to overall development of families and communities. Their options are galore.

Spreading a farming culture in SADC

Using hard-earned remittances they regularly send home, they have acquired or developed properties in different towns and cities, as well as contributing to modernising our rural homes and mechanising our smallholder agriculture. Not too far back, former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa paid tribute to our nationals for their role in the development of indigenous agriculture in South Africa. The story is the same in Zambia, where our people have had a long history of farming there. We also see more Zimbabweans making inroads in Mozambique, where they have carved a niche for themselves in agriculture. This is as it should be.

Huge remittances

I have had a few occasions during which I have interacted with Zimbabweans living in South Africa. That way and through other mechanisms, Government has been able to keep them plugged in on home developments, including our development programmes across sectors, and our Vision 2030. As a result, Zimbabweans in the diaspora, including South Africa, have contributed immensely to national programmes, and towards the attainment of Vision 2030. Today, their remittances exceed a billion-and-a-half United States dollars, making them a veritable source of our foreign earnings.

Reversing brain drain

In my interaction with our nationals in the diaspora, including those in South Africa, I was struck by the vast skills they have been able to build on the excellent education we provided them with as a nation. The skills repertoire they now have is vast and today stands as a huge investment we have inadvertently made as a nation through them, as they stayed abroad. One example concretely illustrates the dramatic impact of this investment.

As we sought to rehabilitate our national electricity grid, we realised we were short of skills, a good many of which we had lost through brain drain. We invited Zimbabwean engineers in the diaspora to step in and assist in this endeavour. The response was overwhelming, again showing our people’s hearts are always with us and their nation here at home. When called upon, they do not hesitate to come back home to contribute.

Self-repatriation was

already underway

As a matter of fact, the expiry of ZEP merely reinforced a self-repatriation trend that was already underway. Lately, and especially in the last year or so, we saw many Zimbabweans abroad already retracing their steps back home to exploit opportunities which now daily show, as our economy recovers and continues to grow. Government, thus, sees the expiry of ZEP, and the return of our citizens in the diaspora, as a boon; it is not a bane.

Thank you, South Africa!

We thank all those countries which gave them shelter and more skills while we sorted out our affairs for recovery and growth. South Africa ranks foremost among those countries. With our economy now on an irreversible growth trajectory, the time has now come for our nation to claim back its own and to assume full responsibilities for its citizens who may wish or need to come back home. They now have opportunities to contribute here at home. This is how my Government views this latest development.

Need for hard planning

Still, Government does not underestimate weighty decisions and onerous work required to smoothly repatriate all our nationals, and to re-integrate them in the home economy and society. Alive to this challenge, I used the just-ended 36th Session of the African Union in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to touch base with my brother, President Cyril Ramaphosa of the sister Republic of South Africa, and with Professor Antonio Vitorino, the director-general of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). IOM is a United Nations agency.

South Africa will assist the process

The repatriation of our nationals from South Africa means our two sister governments have to work and collaborate closely. My excellent meeting with President Ramaphosa paved the way for this collaborative work to begin. I am aware that our nationals are found in different parts, towns and cities of South Africa; most notably, in the provinces of Gauteng, Eastern and Western Cape, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal.

We need the support of the South African authorities to securely move our dispersed nationals back home without incident. President Ramaphosa assured me of maximum support of his government on this matter in order to make the repatriation an unqualified success. As I write, officials of our two governments continue to meet in preparation for the exercise.

Mapping team on the road

Our mapping team is set to leave for South Africa this week. The team comprises officials from many different Government departments to ensure preparations are comprehensive and attend to every detail. The team includes medical experts and officials from several ministries, including those from Primary and Secondary Education. We have to ensure that pupils already in South African schools are not prejudiced during the translocation of families. They have to be re-inserted in classes with minimum disruption. We also need to ensure families which had acquired assets do not lose out as they relocate back home.

Those assets will give them a head-start as they resume life back home. Our medical experts will ensure that the whole programme is alive to issues of public health, principally risks posed by Covid-19 infections as our people move back.

IOM will assist us

My meeting with Professor Antonio Vitorino of IOM ensured the United Nations gets involved, and that all its expectations during the migration exercise are fully met. In that meeting, I emphasised two critical areas, namely, the need for a comprehensive mapping exercise of all migrants coming back home; and the need for a combined strategy of our Government and IOM in facilitating the re-integration of our nationals both in host communities and in different sectors of the receiving economy.

The mapping exercise will identify all those who are set to come back home: by name, by family, by location, by current sources of livelihood, by assets accumulated over time and, more important, by occupation or skills brought into or acquired during their stay in South Africa. Such comprehensive mapping will allow us to prepare for the homecoming of our nationals, as well as identifying start-up and employment opportunities for them once they are in the country. IOM’s vast experience in this area will assist us enormously. I am happy that IOM is already working closely with our officials in this exercise.

Why welcome returning Zimbabweans?

Why is it important for us to welcome back our returning citizens? Fundamentally, because this is their home, which means it is their inalienable right to be accommodated back in their homeland. In leaving the country to scout for opportunities, they never renounced their citizenship; if anything, they became even more acutely aware of its value and the need for it to assure them of a permanent place they call home.

A boon to our economic recovery, growth

Second, no returning citizen is a cost to his country of birth. Like I have already intimated, these returning citizens are highly skilled and proficient in various trades we need for the recovery and growth of our economy. They are, thus, part of our manpower strategy for National Development Strategy 1 and Vision 2030. Even where some might have weak or no skills, it is our responsibility to equip them with skills that guarantee them gainful employment and a wherewithal to live. Our economy is now on a growth trajectory; it can now carry a greater part of its citizenry, especially those with skills or those who are trainable.

Exposing our detractors

Third and broadly, for far too long, detractors of both Zimbabwe and South Africa have been using this Zimbabwe emigre community to attack and strain our excellent bilateral relations. Equally, the false ogre created out of this emigre community was being used to dodge frank and honest discussions on the baneful legacies of colonialism and apartheid in our whole region, and on the impact of illegal and punitive Western sanctions against Zimbabwe on our region.

Now, with our citizens out of the way, this red herring will no longer be available for abuse by these detractors who now have to confront real facts of a bad history and vindictive contemporary politics of illegal sanctions. I did not like a situation where our nationals were being used to take pot-shots at our excellent, needful, fraternal relations between us and the sister Republic of South Africa. These, after all, date back to our liberation struggles in Southern Africa, where a culture of thy brother and sister’s keeper was the order of the day.

Reshaping Southern Africa

Equally, those who have been scapegoating our nationals resident in South Africa for persistent ills stemming from a long apartheid will now have to explain why certain problems will continue to bedevil our two post-colonial and post-apartheid societies long after the last Zimbabwean has left South African soil.

Removing migrant Zimbabwean labourers out of this deliberately distorted equation will help us see reality, however hard, and help us all to plan our relations in the context of regional integration and the hope for a continental free trade area where capital, goods, services and labour freely move across borders. Above all, this will help us plan for a spatially balanced regional industrialisation policy to ensure no one economy spews surplus labour to the rest, while another plays sponge to high unemployment in the rest. We are on the cusp of a new Southern Africa.