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In South Africa, immigration feeds corrupt officials and race hate

By Reuters
24 March 2017   |   4:29 am
The Nigerian says police shot him because he refused to pay them bribes. Similar claims of police corruption are echoed by hundreds of immigrants in South Africa. Some are resigned to paying out so they can stay in the country.

In 2010 police in Johannesburg shot Justin Ejimkonye, a Nigerian migrant, in the leg. The reason why is unclear: It took the police 18 months to charge Ejimkonye with any crime. When they did bring a charge, saying he was carrying cannabis, a public prosecutor decided not to pursue the case for lack of evidence.

The Nigerian says police shot him because he refused to pay them bribes. Similar claims of police corruption are echoed by hundreds of immigrants in South Africa. Some are resigned to paying out so they can stay in the country. Others feel powerless to act. But over the past seven years, Ejimkonye, who says he is in the country legally, has refused to keep quiet. Now he is pursuing a civil claim for damages. He says law enforcement and immigration officials have continued to brutalise and wrongfully detain him. A high court has twice ordered the police to set him free.

“I still think every day they will come for me,” said Ejimkonye, 31. “I’m fighting for my life.” The Nigerian, who walks with a limp, is suing South Africa’s minister of home affairs, the local government, a police officer and an official at the Department for Home Affairs for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages as a result of this alleged maltreatment. His case has been filed at a Johannesburg high court and is due to be heard in August. It is a fresh challenge to the misrule and abuse that even the government sees in South Africa’s immigration system.

“This is an important case and the evidence is extensive and conclusive,” said Bulelani Mzamo, Ejimkonye’s attorney. “A lot of people in authority are in deep trouble.”
National police declined to comment on the case; the police investigatory body said it had not been informed about it. Told of the case by Reuters, Mayihlome Tshwete, a spokesman for Home Affairs, said he would look into it. Tshwete said the problems it highlights were “systemic” in the past but are improving under Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba, who was appointed in 2014 and has launched a drive against corruption, arresting tens of officials in his department on corruption charges.

South Africans worry that foreigners are taking their jobs and creating crime, and migrants say the immigration system is failing. The same forces that send West Africans to Italy are driving sub-Saharan Africans – nearly half of them from Zimbabwe – into the continent’s richest state. South Africa rejects 95 percent of asylum applications as unjustified. But so far, it has been unwilling to deport those migrants. It houses more than a million people with temporary residence permits who are unsure what is going to happen to them.

That has fostered extortion. More than 20 refugees or migrants interviewed by Reuters said they had suffered corruption and worse at the hands of police and immigration officers. A 2015 report by Lawyers for Human Rights and the African Centre for Migration and Society, two NGOs, found one-third of immigrants experience corruption at South African refugee registration offices. Another report, published last November by NGO Corruption Watch, found more than 300 foreigners complained of extortion, threats and solicitation from government officials. President Jacob Zuma said last month a system of “bribes for permits” poses a serious security risk for the country.

A spate of attacks against Nigerians in Johannesburg sparked protests in February and revenge attacks against South African businesses in Nigeria. This month South Africa’s Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, after meeting the Nigerian foreign minister, said she would launch a scheme to track and deter xenophobic attacks. At least 66 foreign Africans in South Africa were killed in xenophobic attacks between January 2015 and January 2017, according to the African Centre for Migration and Society.

The chaos has its roots in the end of apartheid in 1994, when Nelson Mandela helped draw up a constitution with some of the world’s most generous human rights laws, in a bid to redress the divides under white-minority rule. The constitution grants people seeking asylum many of the same rights as South Africans. Now Gigaba wants to change the law to crack down on so-called “economic migrants” by reducing asylum-seekers’ rights and introducing a quota system.

“Unfortunately we fear a large-scale flare-up of xenophobic violence is just around the corner,” said Wayne Ncube, an attorney at the Johannesburg Law Clinic. “It just takes a spark.”

“SPECIAL DUTIES”
Almost all the African immigrants Reuters spoke to said corruption and violence were part of their daily lives. A group of Zimbabweans living in Yeoville, a Johannesburg suburb popular with African migrants, described a well-organised system established by the police.

Officers in their area came to collect money each week, the migrants said. Those who didn’t pay were arrested, they said, and eventually sent to a Johannesburg migrant detention centre, Lindela, where thousands of people are still awaiting a decision on their asylum applications.

“If you pay, you’re fine. If you don’t have money then you’re arrested or beaten up until you can pay,” said 28-year-old taxi driver Thando Banda, from Zimbabwe.

Yeoville police declined to comment.
Ejimkonye, the Nigerian, says he arrived in South Africa in October 2005 and was issued with various permits until 2007 when he married a South African, which entitled him to stay permanently on a spousal visa. He had dreamed of a future as a soccer player, but by early February 2010 was running a hair salon in Germiston, a suburb of Johannesburg.

One day, he says, police stopped him as he was driving his Toyota truck. They demanded 900 rand ($70), which he refused to pay. The police impounded his vehicle and charged him a fine to recover it.

A few weeks later, on Feb. 25, the same police officers stopped him again, documents drawn up by both Ejimkonye and the police show. Ejimkonye says he told them he would not pay any bribes. At that, he says, police officer John Kichener Johnstone removed his police issue Beretta revolver from its holster and fired a 9 millimetre round into the back of Ejimkonye’s leg.

The Germiston police station did not respond to requests for comment, or to contact Johnstone. Savage Jooste and Adams, the law firm representing the local government and officer Johnstone, declined to comment. The firm has submitted a defence in Ejimkonye’s case, Ejimkonye’s lawyers said.

In a separate statement prepared for a court hearing that in the end did not take place, Johnstone said he and his police colleagues were doing “special duties,” which he did not detail at the time.

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