Andrew Stegmann
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SA to Get Child Passport

PRETORIA – The Department of Home Affairs says it’s working hard to make travel easier for South Africans.

For many parents, getting the right documents to leave the country with their kids, is a nightmare, in response Home Affairs is now working on introducing a passport for children.

Home Affairs Director General, Mkuseli Apleni said, “Now we have designed a new passport at the time that the parents applying for the child passport, the details of parents will already be in the passport, parents cannot change they will remain until you die, then there won’t be a need to carry the birth certificate.”

The new passport will become available next year.

The department hopes this document will also help stop child trafficking. Over 30, 000 minors are trafficked through South African borders annually.

Meanwhile, officials say budget cuts have affected operations.

Apleni explained, “As a department we were affected about the issue of capping the number of positions, we are lower base it causes problems and at the OR Tambo you cleared based on the number of counters and it’s frustrate passengers to arrive at OR Tambo, there are 45 counters and 20 counters are manned, cause we don’t have people.”

But despite the personnel shortages, officials are promising, travellers will get adequate service at immigration checkpoints.

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Andrew Stegmann
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Uganda: When Kenyan Immigration Officials Almost Deported Me

It was not my mistake yet officials of Kenya’s Directorate of Immigration and Registration of Persons almost deported me to “teach me a lesson”.

It was mid-morning early this month when I arrived at Nairobi’s Wilson Airport on a domestic flight.

Passenger baggage was scanned and we showed our IDs to an immigration official, who appeared to be past middle age. She flipped the pages of my passport. She flipped some more. She looked at me. Then flipped again. I was beginning to hold up the queue.

The official asked why my passport did not have an entry visa stamp. I said I had no idea whether it had or not. When I flew into Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) days earlier, I had presented my passport to a man at the immigration desk handling East Africans. I had seen him stamp it before handing it back to me.

Andrew Stegmann

Relocation Africa wishes all our clients and friends a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year!

Andrew Stegmann

Chinese companies employ a lot more African workers than you think

Across Africa and throughout the West there is a widespread belief that a good portion of the Chinese construction workers building infrastructure across the continent are actually prisoners who have been forcibly enslaved to work in Africa. So the reason why Chinese companies allegedly do not hire locals, according to this legend, is because there is such an abundant supply of convict labor that can be conscripted to work long hours and endure brutal working conditions.

This myth is so widely trafficked, and not just among poorly-informed social media commentators but also among supposedly well-informed academics and highly-respected news organizations, that is some ways it has become an accepted truth.’Of course the Chinese import convicts,’ how else can you explain the barbed wire that surrounds construction sites, or the shabby conditions so many of their workers live in and the fact that they often have to work seven days a week?

Well, the reality is that barbed wire is often intended to keep people on OUTside from coming rather than incarcerating those on the INside. While they may not be prisoners, it is fair to say their living conditions are often comparable to those of inmates, which comes as a surprise to many in Africa who often mistakenly assume that all foreigners live the luxurious lifestyle of a white aid worker. As for overtime, well, for many Chinese contractors that is a foreign concept. There is no overtime. You work until the job is done. Period.

While the often harsh labor policies of many Chinese companies are out of sync with the commonly accepted standards in Africa, and elsewhere, the workers are most certainly not slaves nor is there any evidence they are convicts.

Despite the confidence of those who propagate this myth, there is no empirical proof to confirm their suspicions. Scholars from around the world have scoured Africa and Chinese work sites looking for even a sliver of proof that the Chinese are importing forced labor to work in Africa. To date, no one has found any indication that this widely-believed myth is actually true.

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