Times Of Swaziland: DISGRACEFUL!

DISGRACEFUL!
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By Martin Dlamini on 28/07/2017 08:55:00


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!