On Tuesday, 16 December, a Johannesburg centre processing applications for South Africans wishing to take up ‘refugee’ status was raided by Home Affairs officials and the police. We break it down. In August,Daily Maverick broke the storyof how the US State Departmentwas applying for visas for about 30 Kenyans to come to South Africa to assist with processing Afrikaners who were applying for “refugee” status in the US.
The refugee programme is coordinated by the Resettlement Support Centre (RSC) Africa, which is operated by Church World Service out of Nairobi, Kenya. In addition, though this has not been officially confirmed, a government official told Daily Maverick that it is believed that Kenyans were thought more suitable to carry out this particular task because South Africans might harbour animosity towards the applicants — who are being granted “refugee” status premised on a false claim of “white genocide” in SA. Church World Service did not respond to Daily Maverick’s request for comment on Wednesday.
We reported that the Department of Home Affairs had received applications in late July for 30 Kenyans to enter on volunteer visas. But, to qualify for a volunteer visa, the applicants would not have been able to receive any paid remuneration for the work they would do in South Africa — which was clearly not going to be the case. The Department of Home Affairs on Wednesday confirmed that these visa applications were “lawfully declined”.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
[paywall]
The Kenyans would also not have qualified for work visas, which require a job offer from a South African employer, not a foreign entity. In addition, it could hardly have been claimed that the Kenyans were needed on account of possessing scarce skills that South Africans did not, since the work they were carrying out was “fairly low-grade clerical work”, to quote a government official. Daily Maverick also understands that there was significant irritation within the Cabinet at the request to assist with a “refugee” programme that the government considers ludicrous, so nobody was about to bend the law to help the Americans here.
It would appear so, because this was the premise of the raid conducted on a Johannesburg refugee processing centre on Tuesday. “The operation followed after intelligence reports indicated that a number of Kenyan nationals had recently entered South Africa on tourist visas and had illegally taken up work at a centre processing the applications of so-called refugees to the United States,” stated the Department of Home Affairs.
[/paywall]
