A Zimbabwean pupil studying in South Africa is stuck in Harare after his visa application was branded a scam and was banned from South Afr...
A Zimbabwean pupil studying in South Africa is stuck in
Harare after his visa application was branded a scam and was banned from South
Africa for five years.
Tinashe Bello (16) was happily at school in Cape Town until
he applied for a visa to allow him to represent his school in a German soccer
tournament. Tinashe has now been separated from his mother, Wadzanai, since
March this year. Wadzanai has now taken Home
Affairs to court.
Ground Up reports that Bello is being represented by the
Legal Resources Centre. Tinashe has been at Zonnebloem Nest High School since
2015. Then in February he was selected to go to Germany to represent his school
in a soccer tournament. But for Tinashe to leave and re-enter South Africa the
German embassy insisted he get a study visa, not the visitor’s visa for which
Bello had initially applied for at the Visa Facilitation Centre (VFS) in Cape
Town.
On the advice of VFS, Bello sent Tinashe to Zimbabwe to
apply for the study visa as an application can only be made outside of South
Africa. Since she could not accompany her son because she was working in Cape
Town, she relied on the assistance of her extended family in Zimbabwe and a
South African family that assisted with supporting documents and money to
enable Tinashe to apply for the visa.
But in May Tinashe was suddenly informed that his
application was “a scam”. In her affidavit, Bello says the South African Home
Affairs official then tore up Tinashe’s passport and threw it away. Tinashe was
informed that he was banned from returning to South Africa for a period of five
years.
Bello’s affidavit says that the action by the director
general (DG) to dismiss the visa application as fraudulent was substantively
and procedurally unfair. Tinashe was not given an opportunity to make
representations nor was he given an opportunity to exercise his right of review
or appeal in terms of the Immigration Act.
Tinashe was in possession of a valid passport and the information
that was provided was correct, according to Bello’s affidavit. If there is any
suspicion about the authenticity of the documents, there are other means
available to the Director General to verify the information.
“The Department has
received the Notice of Motion from the Cape Town State Attorney’s office, on 26
September 2018, and has noted that there are allegations made against certain
officials (of the Department). We have given the state attorney’s office instructions
to oppose this matter. Litigation is still proceeding and the Department will
be filing its papers in due course,” said David Hlabane, Media manager at
Department of Home Affairs.
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