Hope dwindles for South Africans stranded abroad

South Africans stranded abroad and desperate to come home are being hamstrung by red tape, communication breakdowns and a lot of heartache, as global lockdown measures clashed with their hopes for a swift return.

The Department of International Affairs and Cooperation is calling for understanding, saying not all South Africans could be returned, with most nations under strict lockdowns and states of emergency.

According to Dirco spokesperson Lunga Ngqengelele, South Africa had to date repatriated close to 1,000 South Africans from various countries since the start of global pandemic. All those who returned, he added, would have been screened and subjected to the mandatory 14-day quarantine period. But he wanted to stress that government is not engaged in a program to repatriate all South Africans, but is dealing with each case as it presented itself.

“Unlike in the situation where we fetched citizens from Wuhan, China who were, in the main, students, this time around there is no government-led decision to repatriate people. In the main, we have been through negotiations with countries that were repatriating their own citizens from South Africa through South African Airways (SAA) and other flight systems,” he said. “We would ask them to them help us bring those South Africans who were stranded abroad. This is what has been the case in terms of Ghana and so on, where there was a way in terms of flights that are en route from London (UK), Germany and other places in Europe. It depends on those negotiations as well as the availability of of flights.”

This was of little comfort to 43-year-old Ryan Muller whose teaching trip to the Ivory Coast last month quickly morphed into a nightmare when, soon after his arrival, the spread of the pandemic intensified in that country as it did back home, leaving him and several others at the mercy of a foreign government in a state of emergency.

The South African government had yet to convince the Ghanaian government to open its borders for desperate South Africans who wanted to leave the Ivory Coast to catch a connecting SAA flight, which would stop in Accra en route from London to Johannesburg later this month.

“The biggest issue has been the lack of information on the ground. We have to rely on third-party information,which is never great when we are trying to make decisions. The situation in the Ivory Coast is that even though government had imposed a lockdown, people are still active, walking around and there is a lot of police and military presence,” said Muller.

The pair also faced a language barrier, because they could not speak French, and their translator had gone home since the state of emergency was imposed days before South Africa went under lockdown.

Paula*, a South African nurse working in a government hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, says she is despondent and living in constant fear. Since initial lockdown measures were placed last month, the Middle-Eastern government had imposed a “24-hour lockdown” where movement was so restricted, she had not been outside for weeks, save for her shuttle trips to work and back.

Permits were hard to come by and government allowed very little movement, even to essential service providers such as supermarkets and pharmacies. She complained that the South African government gave little hope that she would be able to leave before she contracted the virus herself.

“What happened was that (SA) government emailed everyone a (form) that we were supposed to fill in if we were stranded and wanted to go home. According to them what they were saying is that they wanted to take us home but they were still busy negotiating to get us a flight out of Saudi Arabia and they were waiting for (the Saudi government) to get back to them. The most frustrating thing, however, is that they say they are only taking those who are really stranded like those who were on vacation and those who had exit visas as priorities, and people like us would be at the bottom of this list.”

Paula* was part of a Whatsapp group of 229 South Africans in the monarchy who communicated their daily desperation to go back home amid fears that they would not be subject to the same human rights and freedoms enjoyed in South Africa as the pandemic continued to spread. All of this while the government in that country imposed increasingly stricter regulations, which according to Paula, severely restricted their ability to seek assistance.

Ngqengqelele said it was important to note that governments imposed lockdown measures in order to stop the spread of the virus and the need to cooperate in this global endeavour had to be considered when looking at cases of South Africans who wanted to be repatriated.

“With this we have asked people to to register with embassies and based on the numbers we are seeing, those that are desperate and want to come back based on the different categories of priorities which are: those who are stranded at airports, students who have been asked to leave their residences, the elderly as well as those who are sick and require medical attention.”

The latter did not include those diagnosed with Covid-19.

To contact Dirco’s command centre, the following numbers and email addresses were available for South Africans abroad and locally for those whose family members were abroad.
Tel: (+27) 123511000
(+27) 123511752

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