In the interview with ACI Africa, Fr. Kembo described the way children are smuggled into South Africa and other neighboring countries as extremely dangerous. He said, “In some instances, children are put in a truck driven by Malaitshas and taken to South Africa in the disguise of carrying luggage.”
“These children are covered in a tent and driven for such a long journey under inhumane conditions that can even lead to suffocation and in some instance road accidents,” he further said, adding, “Some of the children cross into South Africa in a trailer. And just imagine what normally happens to trailers; they can just dismantle them.”
The CPLO Director who has been doing advocacy work at some of the major border posts between Zimbabwe and South Africa, Malawi and Mozambique said that parents living in South Africa often pay drivers of luggage buses or trucks to transport their children into South Africa.
“Undocumented Zimbabwean Parents who have settled in South Africa pay bus drivers or Malaitshas to bring their children to South Africa,” Fr. Kembo told ACI Africa.
He made reference to a testimony from those facilitating the movement of the children saying, “Some bus drivers told me that it's safer when children are transported by buses because parents often collect them at the bus stop upon arrival in South Africa.”
“If these children are caught by migration officials, they are deported to Beitbridge,” the 53-year-old Catholic Priest said in reference to the border town in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland South Province where the undocumented children are taken as part of the agreement between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
He added, “The sad reality is that most parents are afraid to go and identify their children because they themselves are undocumented, and fear being caught and deported, so they never appear.”
The deportation of children, Fr. Kembo said, “can be very traumatizing for the children because they don’t understand why it is happening to them; these children become victims.”
Save the Children estimates that at least 30 percent of the refugees and migrants who enter South Africa are children. Many of the children, the children’s entity indicates, are unaccompanied and undocumented, the highest proportion globally.
In the April 22 interview, the Director of CPLO said the entity of ZCBC “tries to sensitize parents, drivers and bus conductors not to be involved in such risky activities in conjunction with Child Safeguarding principles, while upholding the best interest of the child principle in supporting life.”
