Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

South Africa’s borders are a shambles. There are just 19 police officers to control 3600km of coastline and 283 officers to control nearly 5 000km of land.

There should be 448 officers controlling the coastline and 970 officers on the land border.

As a direct result, according to the Auditor General’s damning report on border control, there are between three and five million illegal immigrants in the country.

The SAPS has been responsible for borderline control since 2004, when it started a five-year process to take over from the Defence Force, but it doesn’t have all the specialised equipment that the army used.

During the 2006/07 financial year, the SAPS spent R77.7 million on border control and R363.7 million on ports of entry.

However the AG’s report tabled in parliament this week found that the number of illegal immigrants in the country represent “between three and five million breaches of border control and security.”

Air border security has also been compromised. Instead of 18 permanent staff and two fieldworkers per province, there have only been temporary secondments from other units.

The AG found that the government had not done any specific border intelligence since it transferred the responsibility of guarding the borders from the Defence Force to the police in 2004. Nor has there been any specialised training for border control or even strategic planning.

Ports of entry either have too few or no critical equipment such as baggage scanners, CCTV cameras and hand-held explosives detection systems. Where these are in place, they are often not used.

No land ports have cargo scanners, yet one border post recorded 75874 trucks leaving South African and 58 252 coming in, during the period under review.

Incoming and outgoing traffic are not separated, increasing the risk of smuggling with documentation easily exchanged.There were no controls to avoid freight being tampered with after freight had been cleared. The eight passenger and 223 freight trains that pass through seven border points every week are also not inspected either.

Some border fences are in a state of disrepair, not equipped with sensors and generally “inadequate”.

Some land ports are not manned for 24-hour periods. There are no patrols or monitoring processes where South African borders are mountains, dams or rivers.

Planes can cross illegally because the SAPS does not have the equipment to detect low-flying aircraft.

The report also slammed failures by the the Border Control Coordinating Committee.

Last year, a Musina-based Home Affairs official said the country was facing a “human tsunami” from thousands of Zimbabweans fleeing the economic meltdown there.

At the time, Safety and Security parliamentary committee chairperson Maggie Sotyu admitted the arrests of more than 5 000 illegal border-crossers in a fortnight were just “the people we managed to catch”.

On a recent trip to the Beit Bridge border, a patrolling SA Defence Force soldier pointed out Zimbabweans without papers standing in no-man’s land about to cross into South Africa in full view of South African border officials.

These included young men who smuggled people across the border by dropping a rope down from the bridge to the South African side of the Limpopo River, he said. Once on the ground, the migrants then found a spot where to cross the three rows of border fencing.

“The problem is that if we catch and deport them today, tomorrow they’re back here. It just carries on,” the soldier said.

A drive along the border line showed the damage wrought by the fence jumpers. The outer fence had been ripped away entirely for 200 metres at one section – very close to an SANDF outpost.

Last September, a report by the Forced Migration Studies Programme at Wits University and the Musina Legal Advice Office pointed out the difficulty of accurately gauging the number of illegal immigrants entering every month.