Africa-Press – Botswana. The United Kingdom’s broad pursuit to include Botswana as another top selection for a potential migrant deal has encountered a stumbling block after Botswana’s minister of foreign affairs, Dr. Lemogang Kwape, stated that the country is unable to take in migrants.
“I can confirm that indeed the British government, through the foreign secretary and the minister for Africa, indeed approached Botswana through diplomatic channels to receive illegal migrants that are destined for United Kingdom but we did not accede to their requests,” Kwape told Xoli Mngambi, the senior anchor for Newzroom Afrika.
Kwape’s retorts come after The Times’ Home Affairs Editor, Matt Dathan, disclosed in an article a fortnight ago that internal government documents they obtained suggested that the UK had launched negotiations with Botswana, the Ivory Coast, Costa Rica, and Armenia to replicate the Rwanda Safety Bill.
The Rwanda bill is a five-year agreement under which some asylum seekers arriving in the UK will be transported to Rwanda to have their claims processed there. The proposal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was first announced by the government of Boris Johnson in April 2022.
Kwape indicated that “clearly the British government does not want these people in their country so they want to ferry them to a far way country. We have enough problems that we are dealing with, especially immigration problems, so i think to receive unwanted immigrants from another country while we are dealing with our own problems in the region will be unfair to Botswana,” he said.
When quizzed whether the immigrants are African or from Ukraine, he noted that the interactions that he has had indicate that the origins of the migrants might possibly be from Afghanistan, adding that “I wouldn’t go as far as saying there was racial profiling”.
Some African countries such as Kenya have rejected migration agreements with the U.K due to their perception of the agreements as “a new form of colonialism.” Neighbouring Namibia is also reported to have rejected the same plan and expressly declining to engage in technical discussions with the United Kingdom. However several other African countries including Togo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Cape Verde, Senegal, and Tanzania, have been placed “on a reserve list that would be approached if other targets failed”.
Despite being a State Party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, Botswana was hesitant to accept Afghan refugees and shelter them at the Dukwi refugee camp following a request from the United States of America (USA) in August 2021. The request came after Taliban fighters took control of Kabul following the withdrawal of U.S forces in the country. A few western nations, including the UK, pledged at the time to take in 20,000 refugees over the course of five years.
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