When her refugee permit expired in June last year, Congolese nurse Marseline Buhoro started getting calls from her bank in Johannesburg saying her account would be frozen.
Then her children’s university told her they would not be able to graduate because her family was technically undocumented.
Buhoro pleaded for a grace period, explaining she had finally figured out how to apply for a renewal using the government’s new online system but had been waiting months for confirmation that her application went through.
“It’s like a second trauma,” said the 53-year-old nurse who came to SA in 2005 to escape a civil war that killed her husband and three of her children.
“They freeze your account, your landlord is on your neck, you can’t buy food because you have no access to money — then it’s the stigma of being in the country illegally,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.
Many, many, many refugees don’t even have an email address … how do we expect them to do an online permit renewal that isn’t yet efficient?
The new online system that went live in April 2021 was supposed to be a lifeline for refugees and asylum seekers who had not been able to renew their permits since refugee reception centres closed in 2020 during the national Covid-19 shutdown.
But refugee rights groups warn that tens of thousands of applicants have been struggling to navigate the new system or have failed to receive responses to their applications, causing them to miss a December 2021 deadline for permit renewals.
In late February, the department of home affairs (DHA) announced in a government gazette that a new deadline would come into effect, giving applicants until the end of April 2022 to renew their permits.
But with SA’s refugee reception offices still closed, those struggling with the online system face the risk of deportation, bank account closure