Laborers in South Africa Get Reprieve

Farmers in this country’s Northern Province won a court injunction Monday temporarily halting the expulsion of 10,000 Zimbabwean farm workers and staving off possible damage to the area’s agricultural economy.

Under a deal reached by the government and the farmers a year ago to create more jobs for South Africans, Zimbabweans working on labor-intensive citrus and vegetable farms around Messina, a border town in Northern Province, were supposed to leave the country by Monday.

But a high court in Pretoria, the administrative capital, stopped the deportations to allow negotiations between the government and farmers. A second court hearing will be scheduled for a later date.

Farmers from the 93 agricultural enterprises near the border with Zimbabwe expressed hope that the reprieve will allow time to find new workers and complete harvesting their crops next year.

“We know the Zimbabweans should go back, but we need time to replace them,” said Edward Vorster, president of Agri North, a farmers union. “Some of these workers have been here for 10, 15, 20 years. Farmers are asking to keep their key personnel. The ordinary workers they can replace, they’re not so vulnerable training-wise. But you can’t replace them in a day, that’s the problem.”

The government, which had threatened to slap stiff fines and criminal charges on farmers caught with Zimbabweans on their land past the deadline, remained adamant.

“These people [the farmers] have been flouting the law for a long time,” said Leslie Mashokwe, a spokesman for South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs, adding that the government had been “upholding the rule of law” in its decision to repatriate illegal laborers.

Bankruptcies and Job Losses Predicted

Representatives of the farmers warned that a large-scale repatriation could spell disaster for Northern Province--which relies heavily on income from agricultural production--and could result in widespread bankruptcy and job losses. The nation’s farming sector is already grappling with the impact of South Africa’s free-market reforms and with tough international competition from subsidized producers.

There also was concern that the expulsions would trigger instability and crime in the border region as thousands of jobless Zimbabweans resorted to desperate means to survive. Zimbabwean officials warned that the action would hurt their nation’s already ailing economy.

But Mashokwe said the South African government’s primary concern is its own citizens. “We have a responsibility to the locals who need employment and social services.”

South Africa’s unemployment rate runs about 30%, and critics blame what they view as the government’s poor economic policy for causing job losses. The number of commercial farmers has dropped during the past three decades to about 50,000 from 130,000, bringing a steep fall in employment on farms.

Zimbabweans have always been a cheap source of labor.

“The consensus is that these have been model workers,” said Godfrey Musatare Dzvairo, Zimbabwe’s consul general in Johannesburg. “They are very reliable. They are very honest. They give their money’s worth.”

But South African officials believe that they take employment opportunities from residents in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces.

“There are locals who could pick and plant tomatoes just as well, and that would create jobs,” said Mashokwe, adding that a request by farmers to be allowed to keep “exceptional” workers would be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Mashokwe said farmers in Northern Province had shunned South African workers. “They are saying local labor is lazy,” he said. “They are saying that when they take local workers, they don’t stay for a long time on the farm. They are also saying workers are not available.”

The Home Affairs official noted that in many cases Zimbabweans were underpaid, adding that others were not paid wages at all but just given room and board. Pickers earn between $38 and $95 a month.

South Africa’s Department of Labor reportedly has compiled a list of 20,000 people in the area who are eager for work. On Saturday, the farmers union also set up a recruitment agency in Messina to encourage the hiring of locals.

Over the weekend, scores of Zimbabweans began to stream home. Mashokwe said others had been “dumped at the border post” by their former employers without papers.

Mashokwe said it was unclear how many Zimbabweans had returned before the Monday deadline.

Prospects Back Home Bleak for Zimbabweans

Many Zimbabweans said their prospects back home, where unemployment stands at 60%, were bleak. They were anxious for the South African government to allow them permanent residency.

“If I must go back, then I am going to starve. There is nothing in Zimbabwe,” Bigman Chauke, a farm foreman, was quoted as saying by South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper. “I am here to work, not to steal or do other bad things.”

Dzvairo, the Zimbabwean consul general, acknowledged that many repatriated laborers would have a tough time settling back in and that their arrival would strain the infrastructure of their home areas.

“The difficulty would be how do they feed themselves,” said Dzvairo, who criticized the government here for not giving Zimbabwe fair warning of the possible influx of laborers. “How do the social amenities cope with the increased number of schoolchildren? How do the hospitals cope? These are rural people. The social services in rural areas are already strained.”