Africa-Press – Mozambique. The South African authorities on Monday deported nearly 60 Mozambicans in the country illegally without notifying Mozambique’s Migration Services, an official source said in Maputo.
“When we received the group, the first thing we did was to express our displeasure with the South African authorities for violating the understandings between the two countries on the matter,” Celestino Matsinhe, spokesman for Mozambique’s Migration Service, said on the sidelines of a meeting between the authorities of the two states in Maputo.
The Mozambican citizens, aged between 16 and 42, were deported at the Ressano Garcia border crossing, the main one between Mozambique and South Africa, and came from the country’s central and southern provinces.
According to Celestino Matsinhe, this is the third episode in which South African authorities violate the understandings between the two states in a case of deporting Mozambicans found in an illegal situation.
“These understandings are to be observed,” stressed the spokesman for Mozambique’s Migration Services, adding that prior notification in similar cases allows the authorities to organise “decent” means to take people back to their home provinces.
To escape Mozambique’s high poverty levels, people, mainly young people from rural areas in the south of the country, are illegally emigrating to South Africa in search of better living conditions in the neighbouring country, which has one of the continent’s most advanced economies.
