DISGRACEFUL!

WHEN a principal who has personally invested over E60 million locally is subjected to gross humiliation in front of his teachers and pupils by police officers, then you get to understand why we have a serious immigration problem in the country. This is a problem that is slowly but surely confirming us among states that are xenophobic and highly anti-investor friendly.

Geoffrey Ramokgadi of Kobe Ramokgadi Advanced Learning Academy, whom I have known ever since I was a little boy, has spent 42 years in the country only to be treated like an illegal immigrant who had jumped over the border without any documentation whatsoever, of where he comes from and where he was going.
This is a man whose work permit application is sitting in the very office that authorised his arrest. How pathetic can it get?

He further shows them a document confirming deposition of his application and they couldn’t be bothered to recognise their own document. If for some reason his permit had been rejected, what are the procedures of informing an applicant about this? By arresting him? What does that say to all the work permit holders in the country who run multimillion corporations? What on earth is going on here? We are told hundreds more genuine expat residents are subjected to this treatment. Who is authorising these forced inspections?

The Home Affairs principal secretary could only offer his sympathies and invited Ramokgadi to visit his office. Is that the best the man can say to a person who is incarcerated. It’s hypocritical!
But why are we surprised?  The immigration office is the reason we have a country that has set out to clean house but instead of starting to sweep from the inside out, we are seeing the sweeping on the streets while the inside remains untouched.

We will never sort out the mess without sorting out the officials responsible for it in the first place. You don’t buy a new car and fit an old engine then expect it to perform wonders.
It is the inept immigration office that has brought about the proposed law that seeks to reserve businesses for Swazis. This is not a local empowerment initiative, it is a ‘fix-the mess’ exercise.
If work and residence permits for expatriates were properly executed, the classification and criteria of what is an investor would be well defined and strictly adhered to.

Simply put, each application would be accompanied by the amount of investment and the proof thereof. A fool proof scrutiny would be in place and we would have none of this xenophobic approach to dealing with this issue.
There would certainly be no need for us to have police officers waking up early in the morning going around the country to harass everybody of light skin colour just because we don’t trust our immigration department to be doing their job properly.

This issue also speaks to the need for the employment of people of very high ethical standards where the possibility of corruption abounds because the taxpayer is now footing the bill for the sitting allowances of Parliament who have to debate a Bill to kick out foreigners from small businesses that locals have simply failed to run.

We are also being made to pay for the overtime of our security forces that have to do the rounding up of suspected illegal immigrants, albeit sometimes failing to wake up on time and finding the suspects long gone.
The additional burden to the taxpayer is the probe on the influx of illegal immigrants into the country that has spent months trying to determine the obvious. We all know how the Asian population has suddenly multiplied to become a quarter of our population.

Why do we need a probe for this when we have institutions such as the Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) that are well paid to do the same thing? We also have labour inspectors and training and localisation officers; all doing the same thing. The most laughable of all, is spending a huge slice of the national budget (about 15 per cent) on security, only to end up with so called border patrols that have made crossing into Swaziland a stroll in the park.

Then we lump people like Ramokgadi into this category of suspects. The Minister Princess Tsandzile owes Ramokgadi, the entire expatriate community and the nation at large an apology that is accompanied by the resignation letters of all those responsible for this unwarranted humiliation!  Then we say we are serious about investment? Forget it!

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