South Africa’s system for the established and protective care of refugees and asylum seekers is at its breaking point. Refugee camps in the country have long been the breeding grounds of hate-filled, violent xenophobic attacks directed at non-nationals seeking refuge from oppressive regimes or the ongoing brutality of war in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. South African border camps are the proposed solution for this surge of asylum seekers, which are in fact detention centres created to “process” individuals in sub-par living conditions. This restructuring allows for the closure of numerous refugee camps viewed as parasites attached to the nation’s resources.
Temporary, or long-term detainment?
The numbered, large South African refugee camps account for 26% of the global population of displaced people despite lacking the financial resources to adequately shelter, clothe, protect, and feed their inhabitants. The new border detention centres proposed by the South African government and the internal Department of Home Affairs could potentially trap asylum seekers for years, as they undergo a lengthy selection process to ultimately determine the acceptance or declination of their refugee status.
Of the 62,000 individuals who apply for refugee status annually, the average wait time is around three years, which is not an insignificant length of time to have legal status and employment availability set in limbo. Scapegoated by politicians for South Africa’s high unemployment rate of 25%, asylum seekers who constitute only 4% of the total population are easy targets for aggression and resentment fostered by policy and media releases.
Xenophobic Populism
By inflating figures and statistics that point the nation’s shortage of funds and employment crisis at the influx of asylum seekers, lawmakers promote an unholy union of populism and nationalism, correlating the “good of the nation” with the exclusion of outsiders. Rashan Daddoo, from the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa states that the proposed construction of border camps “…could exacerbate xenophobia because people will have to be fed and provided with shelter…People remain with asylum-seeker status for ten years. If they can’t sort this out in major cities how are they going to have this super efficient system in border areas?”
With refugee camps failing due to insufficient staffing and a severe lack of funding, what little support the encampments did have by way of popular support is quashed by politicians equating failed policy with the arrival of refugees. The creation of border centers in lieu of established camps will only exacerbate an already explosive political and social struggle between SA nationals and migrants.
