Written
by
Sally Spencer.
This last couple of weeks I have been trying to help my best friend in Zimbabwe make head and tail of the Zimbabwean citizenship laws which I might add are a mess and a contradiction to everything human.
This all happened because her 20 year old son had gone to renew his passport and got classed as an Alien. He was born and raised in Zimbabwe, nowhere else. His late Dad was a Zimbabwean, pure bred and his Mom is from Swaziland. She has been living in Zimbabwe since her marriage about 30 years ago. She has never left the country to go and live or work anywhere. Her job as a high school teacher is for the government of Zimbabwe and she has been at the same school for 20 years. At election time she is even able to vote.
What a shock it was to find out that all of a sudden her son is classed as an Alien in the country of his birth. On top of that, it is going to cost 400 US dollars to get his citizenship and as teachers in Zimbabwe only earn about 100US dollars a month, it is virtually impossible for her to raise the money.
Here is the whole mess of laws and sub laws that make Zimbabwean born people Aliens in our country of birth. They are kind of complicated so I hope you can make sense of them.
After the 2000 referendum Zanu PF arrived at the conclusion that they had to disenfranchise those voters that were likely to vote against Zanu PF in future elections. This was aimed at the new MDC party which had been formed and a lot of the White farmers were in the new party. Whites and farm workers who were the people most affected by the chaos of the land reform were the obvious targets. Whites were naturally identifiable by their skin color. Farm workers where targeted using the notion that many of them were of Malawian, Mozambique, Zambian, etc., descent.
So in 2001 Zanu PF amended the citizenship law. The amendment required all citizens of foreign descent (those whose lineage was foreign no matter how far back) to revoke the rights to foreign citizenship within 6 months. This also applieD to people who previously obtained their citizenship through the proper channels.
1. The amendment doesn’t just affect those whose mother or father are foreign. It goes beyond that. According to the amendment if you are born in Zim but your great great great grand parents were foreign then you are a foreigner.So people with surnames like Banda, Zhuwao, etc., who innocently went to the passport office to renew their passports were told that they were no longer citizens and had 6 months to revoke their right to foreign citizenship. Those who did not meet the 6 months deadline automatically lost their citizenship and became stateless. Without citizenship a person can’t vote!
2. The amendment required a person to revoke their right to foreign citizenship. We are not talking here about revoking one’s citizenship of another country. No! What the amendment is demanding is much crazier than that. The amendment asks a person to give up their right to the citizenship of the country of their parents, grand parents and so on.
To understand how crazy and impossible this request is imagine this scenario.
You have 60 year old Banda whose parents died 20 years ago. He is suddenly told that he is stateless (which means that he no longer enjoys the protection of the state). According to the amendment he has to write to the Malawi foreign affairs ministry and ask for a letter that absolves him of any rights to the citizenship of Malawi.
At the Malawian embassy old Banda is told that,
“Sir we don’t have provisions in our laws for a person to give up their rights to Malawian citizenship. Anyway, even if we did, before we can deny you rights to Malawian citizenship you first have to prove to us that you are entitled to Malawian citizenship. Do you have documents to show that you are entitled to Malawian citizenship?”
“No I don’t but as you can see my name is Banda.”
“Ha ha ha … sekuru it doesn’t work like that. You could be a Zimbabwean Banda.”
“Ah, but the Zimbabweans took away my citizenship because my name is Banda!”
You may think that this is a joke but these events are real for millions of Zimbos. Even Kafka could not have imagined such a crazy scenario. But there it is. Any person visiting the passport office will get a good understanding of this.
In 2003 an amendment was made because the people complained about racism and xenophobia. It helped a large amount of people for a short while. Remember why the act was brought in in the first place and then see how they eventually got around that as well.
The staggered elections came around in 2005 and they went back to the old act by using this little loop hole:
QUOTE
“(5) Notwithstanding anything contained in subsection (1) of section 25 of the Civil Evidence Act [Chapter 8:01], if in any proceedings referred to in subsection (4) the Registrar-General produces a document purporting to be a copy of any written law of a foreign country which shows that any person is, by virtue of that law, a citizen of that country, it shall be presumed, unless it is shown to the contrary, that that person is a citizen of that country.”. end of QUOTE.
If the passport office decide that you are entitled to Malawian citizenship then they will assume that you are a Malawian citizen whether you are or not. It is then up to you to prove that you aren’t, which is virtually impossible. To really get even worse if you can prove that you are not, they can tell you that it doesn’t matter as you might become a Malawian citizen at a later date.
The end story of this is that once they have targeted you, no matter what you do each time you go to renew your passport, you will have the same performance and have to go through it all again.
Zimbabwe is a land of disenfranchised people all because of the greed of the Zanu PF elite mafia. They desperately need to stay in power and in control of the country as without it they will have and be nothing. Everything they own is because of whole scale corruption and looting of everything and anything in the country.
