CAPE TOWN---South Africas Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, said the governments move to overhaul the countrys refugee policy will help ease pressure that the department faced in dealing with millions of refugees and asylum seeker applications.He told parliament in Cape Town during his budget presentation speech last week that this was part of moves to enhance operational efficiency.
Home Affairs said recently that it would soon separate economic migrants from authentic asylum seekers.
Having successfully improved operational efficiency, we intend to begin this year completely to overhaul the strategic thrust of refugee policy and legislation. This overhaul will impact extensively on the asylum processes and the details thereof will be announced during the course of the year.
Through this exercise, among others, we hope to separate economic migrants from genuine asylum seekers and thereby resolve this ostensibly intractable problem that puts immense pressure on the system. This is precisely why we began engaging various stakeholders such as trade unions and business on the issue of economic migrants, with the purpose to evolve a policy on the matter. We intend to continue with this very important exercise, Gigaba said.
The failure to differentiate between asylum seekers and economic migrants had resulted in the slowth of the asylum application process.
This had frustrated the asylum seekers, mainly Zimbabwean, who sought refugee from last decades multifaceted crisis.
The inflow of foreign nationals has also fanned xenophobic tendencies.
Gigaba assured that Home Affairs was heldping fight that.
Last year, we also committed ourselves to intensify the Campaign Against Xenophobia. We are pleased to report that as part of this effort we have already trained 102 Community Development Workers and 23 Secondary Schools in affected areas in Gauteng. We are also working with the South African Police Force and other key stakeholders, professionals and activists. Fighting xenophobia is ultimately the responsibility of the public as a whole, and consequently this programme must be premised on mobilising the communities at large against the scourge of xenophobia. During this financial year, we will improve the Departments institutional capacity to lead and coordinate sustainable interventions by creating a Directorate with sufficient resource capacity to lead the programme against xenophobia, focusing on integration and creating harmony. The programme itself is in the process of drafting.
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