Undocumented Malawians at the Durban Drive-in site, where local authorities are working on repatriation efforts.
Image: Doctor Ngcobo/ ANA Studio
Efforts to repatriate undocumented Malawian nationals in an orderly way are under strain from a steady stream of new arrivals, leaving local Home Affairs officials struggling to keep control.
Home Affairs KwaZulu-Natal manager Cyril Mncwabe called the Durban Drive-in site a “bottomless pit”. With no cut-off date, he said authorities are constantly forced to absorb new groups of people to avoid public disorder in busy tourist areas.
On Monday, Mncwabe said they were continuing with processing people as they did at the Sherwood site.
“We have already dispatched about 11 buses that are currently on site, and nine of those buses have already left. We are continuing until such time, whatever time, we may be able to stop. But we’re trying to push as much as possible to create space for the people who are still coming into the site, who were not part of Sherwood,” he said.
He said people are being dropped off outside the site by e-hailing vehicles and others.
“Those people we have to also consider assisting. But we thought it’s gonna be important for us to start by clearing the people who were moved from Sherwood who are already on this site,” Mncwabe said.
“The challenge that we will always have is that we are working on a bottomless pit here. Because, as we think that we are currently pushing from the briefing of the minister, he informed you that we’ve processed about 7,000 people already to date. So now we do not know how many people we are still expecting to come in here because there hasn’t been any mechanism of saying at what point do we then have to cut off.”
The ongoing repatriation effort faces challenges as the number of undocumented Malawian nationals continues to rise.
Image: Doctor Ngcobo/ ANA Studio
Mncwabe said those outside the site must eventually be let in because authorities cannot allow people to sleep on the streets.
According to him, tracking numbers is difficult because the registration plan broke down.
Everyone removed from Sherwood was supposed to be registered and issued a wristband for identification on arrival at the drive-in site, but that failed on Sunday night.
Buses from Pietermaritzburg dumped people who had gone to Sherwood but were not part of the original camp group on the roadside. The municipality then transported them to the drive-in. Mncwabe said the plan to know exactly who was coming in went out the window.
“Our plan had actually assisted us because at the time we started moving males that had come here, we had over 4,000 males that were here. Before the arrival of everybody that is outside and the people that were being moved away from Sherwood.
“The number of how many there are is very, very difficult… We can just estimate that we are around 7,000 to 8,000 currently. Those are the people that are on site, whilst taking into account that some have been dropped by the Ubers and every other transport that is part of the group that is assembled outside of the centre here," he said.