No goodwill for foreign nationals

There is little or no goodwill towards foreign nationals from African states living in South Africa.

Jeannette Kasongo is a trained chef and her husband Pierre a university graduate - but their qualifications are overshadowed by their status as foreign nationals in South Africa. They fled Rwanda's genocidal war 15 years ago and encounter prejudice, discrimination and abuse on a daily basis.

"I am forced to work harder and longer hours without overtime pay. When I query this with my bosses they say it's because I am a foreigner and I don’t have rights," Jeannette Kasongo told IRIN.

"This is affecting me so much that I have a heart problem which started since I started working there. I have been thinking about leaving that job but how would I and my three children and husband survive," she said, showing a brown packet containing medication she had just picked up from the doctor.

Pierre Kasongo, a university trained teacher, works as a car guard at one of the shopping malls in the port city of Durban and "also comes back with the same story of verbal abuse at the hands of the locals, especially black people like us," she said.

Xenophobic violence exploded in South Africa in 2008 and scores of people were killed and more than 100,000 people displaced. During the violence, two Zimbabwe nationals were forced by a mob to jump from an eight-story block of flats. One was killed and the other sustained serious injuries.

A local Durban councilor, Vusi Khoza, and several other people are facing charges of murder and attempted murder for the incident. The court case is scheduled to resume in January 2010.

Esta Mutambara, originally from Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lives a few blocks from where the Zimbabwean men were forced to jump and is regularly taunted as an amakwerekwere, an abusive term for foreign nationals.

Mutambara told IRIN "they [local South Africans] say we come to take away their jobs. Others say we are drug-dealers and we smell. It is so unsafe for us and our families. The thing is every country in the world has foreigners, even America has foreigners but they are not treated the way we are treated when we come to South Africa. The local people have to learn to live with foreigners in their country."

"We hear local people saying there will be trouble here in South Africa after the 2010 World Cup [to be held in June and July]. Some say when the foreign visitors and spectators leave they will drive the amakwerekwere away back to their own countries," she said.

The actual number of foreign nationals residing in South Africa is muddled. Some estimates of as many as 10 million foreign nationals in South Africa is seen by the University of the Witwatersrand's Forced Migration Studies Programme in Johannesburg as "potentially inflammatory" and estimate that the total number of foreign born people in South Africa numbered around 1.3 million.

The Forced Migration Studies Programme using data from South Africa's 2007 Community Survey reasons that "Even allowing that some people were not counted, this is still very far from claims of 3 million Zimbabweans or the figure of 4-7 million undocumented migrants once offered by the Human Sciences Research Council."

The programme estimates that at the most there were 2 million foreign born nationals residing in South Africa, or about 4 percent of the total population, which was relatively low. In Gabon the numbers of foreign born nationals are estimated at 17.9 percent, the US 13 percent, Cote D'Ivoire 12.3 percent, Ghana 7.6 percent, France 10.6 percent and the United Kingdom 9.7 percent.

Yasmin Rajah, director of Refugee Social Services (RSS), a nongovernmental organisation advocating for the rights of refugees and migrants, told IRIN foreign nationals regularly expressed fears that they and their families would be attacked.

Rajah said South Africa's high unemployment rates, conservatively estimated at more than 20 percent, saw foreign nationals and poor South Africans compete at the lower end of the economy. "Because of their [foreign nationals] ability to work hard and sell products and services at lower prices, foreigners tend to beat locals and by doing that they are resented by their competitors."

"It is hard to say whether the attitudes of the South Africans have changed from those of last year when there was a countrywide outbreak of xenophobic attacks and killings. Some people come to us and say they endure the same nasty comments about makwerekwere as last year," she said.

In November 2009 about 2,500 Zimbabwean migrants sought refuge in government buildings in De Doorns, a farming town about 140km from Cape Town, after some of their shacks in an informal settlement were attacked and demolished by local residents. It was stark reminder of how close to the surface resentment runs against foreign born nationals.

Martin Mrema, a Burundian national selling second hand clothes on Durban's streets, took notice of the attacks, even though he lives a few thousand kilometers from the De Doorns, as it reminded him of the 2008 xenophobic violence.

"Even in South Africa cities are not the same. I have lived in Johannesburg and Pretoria and the xenophobic attitude I endured there is far worse than what I encountered here in Durban," he told IRIN.

"But what is even sadder is that South African blacks hate other black people from Africa. There are many other foreigners in this country but only black foreigners are attacked. If the foreigner is white, Indian or Chinese it is fine. But once a person is a black foreigner he is attacked," he said.

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