If the past week has taught South Africans anything, it is that our identities, as defined by concepts of national boundaries and statehood and all the arbitrary and irrational power imbalances contained therein, have real consequence.
The first response on the part of much of the international community to the detection and flagging by our scientists of the Omicron variant was an immediate travel ban, essentially locking us as a people out of the rest of the world and shutting off our international tourism industry and related vital economic activity.
Of course, world leaders will say the imposition of this hardship was never their intention: they were simply looking out for their own. We’ve been treated to disingenuous displays of gratitude on the part of Anthony Blinken of the US and the UK’s Sajid Javid for our government and scientists’ transparency and promptness in issuing the alert, even as they imposed measures that could normally be understood only as acts of hostility.
The travel ban rightly occasioned fierce protest from our government: a categorical insistence that the ban is not only contrary to the accepted science but that it is an utter and obscene repudiation of the entire “Global Responsibility and International Action” plank of the G7 Carbis Bay Communique, issued just this past June and intended to chart the world’s recovery from the pandemic.
And yet we’ve not seen any shamefaced reversal, even as it was reported yesterday that the Dutch health authorities had found the variant in cases in the Netherlands as long as 11 days ago, predating the SA scientists’ announcement.
This is what it means to be, at least by certain international lights, essentially immaterial. We have little recourse even as we know the measures adopted are arbitrary and irrational and, best case, are simply indifferent to the hardship and misery that has been inflicted.
Being as we are at the sharp end of this sort of dehumanising irrationality, you might think we’d be a little more circumspect about imposing it ourselves. And yet just this past week cabinet announced that the Zimbabwean exemption permit, which expires on December 31, will not be extended.
About 180,000 Zimbabweans in SA hold this permit. It is a continuation of a special permit system introduced in 2009, intended to afford some security and relief to the thousands who had fled Zimbabwe’s political turmoil and economic devastation.
That special permit system has now endured for more than a decade. It has allowed those who qualify to build lives and livelihoods here in SA and, as importantly, has meant we have benefited from their contributions to this country.
Now our government says the permits will not be renewed and the permit holders will be afforded a 12-month grace period within which they will need to migrate to a different type of permit relevant to their status or situation, or leave the country. Otherwise they will face deportation.
They make this determination knowing full well that Covid remains very much with us, and that the department of home affairs is dysfunctional even when interacting with those of us whose status is assured.
Even for those permit holders who stand the best chance of acquiring another permit status, the odds of successful and seamless migration within the next 12 months are pretty much insurmountable. But there are thousands who face absolutely no prospect of successful migration.
And so lives and livelihood that for over a decade have enjoyed some sense of security will be thrown into jeopardy. They will face the predicament: life in SA as an undocumented person, always at risk, or return to a country where they have built no life.
Of course, our leaders, like those of our Western allies, will insist that this decision is not intended to inflict hardship but simply to protect their own. But it is when your hardship and misery, entirely predictable and foreseen, is dismissed as unintended and irrelevant, that you are most completely immaterial and surplus.
SA is right to protest against the travel ban and its consequences. But it also needs to demonstrate moral authority, that in similar circumstances it would act differently.
• Fritz, a public interest lawyer, is CEO of Freedom Under Law.
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