Scores of children aged five and upwards face deportation from South Africa to Lesotho if a Grahamstown High Court judge agrees with the home affairs department.
The Catholic church says home affairs wants to deport 90 so-called “undocumented” children, aged between five and 17.
The problem for home affairs is that the children are not properly documented and they now face being separated from their single dads and mothers.
The church says many of the children live in the Eastern Cape.
“The department will be implementing the immigration laws of South Africa where it is necessary,” home affairs provincial spokesperson, Siya Majakajaka said, when asked about the department’s tough stance.
The church’s Aliwal North diocese’s welfare and development committee co-ordinator, Refiloe Mothabeng, provided the following information about some of the children facing deportation: A boy, aged, 13, born from a relationship between a Lesotho woman and an Eastern Cape man, and who is being raised by his father;
The mother of a girl, aged nine, has been told by home affairs officials to produce the child’s South African father and prove his paternity. The church says the father is absent and his whereabouts are unknown;
An eight-year-old girl born in Johannesburg is living in Sterkspruit with her South African father. Her Lesotho mother has died, but the church says home affairs insists that the father’s South African paternity must be proven. The Lesotho family of the child are in financial difficulty and have asked her father to raise her. Mothabeng said officials had visited the children and their single parents two weeks ago and interrogated them about their claimed South African parent.
She said officials were telling the parents and children that their Lesotho-based mothers were their primary caregivers and that the children had to go and live with them in Lesotho.
Aliwal North Catholic parish priest, Father Joe Kizito said that in January the plight of 37 children went before the Grahamstown High Court but the court decision went against the church.
The issue had been the right of the children to attend school in the province.
Schools were not accepting the children because they did not have documentation demanded by the department.
He said they had appealed to the Constitutional Court which ruled on February 15 that the church and the children and parents had a right to appeal the high court order.
The ConCourt had also ordered provincial education superintendent-general Themba Kojana and the minister of basic education minister Angie Matshekga, to allow the children to go to school.
The new appeal will be heard next Tuesday.
Kizito said they initially started looking after 77 undocumented children in a crèche in Aliwal North at the time.
This number had grown to 90, 40 of them who are now living in Aliwal North and 50 in Sterkspruit.
Kizito said their battle with home affairs to get the the children’s birth certificates and enrol the children at school had gone on for two years.
He said the church was in regular contact with the provincial education department.
Kizito accused the department of social development of being lax in helping the children.
Social development spokesperson, Mzukisi Solani, said the department was worried about the children, but the ball was in home affairs’ court.
Majakajaka, said the case was sub-judice. He, however, confirmed that the department was trying to deport the children.
Majakajaka said that the department was being guided by an internal departmental report, but would not say more about the report. He said home affairs rules stipulated that a newborn baby had to be registered within 30 days.
Education spokesperson, Loyiso Pulumani, said that after the ConCourt ruling, Kojana had discussed the issue with Kizito and instructed officials to work with him.
“Additional undocumented learners have since come forward,” Pulumani said...