Nombini Matomela
3 March 2005
South Africa is set to review its visa provisions for other countries, particularly those in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, says Home Affairs Director-General Barry Gilder.
Gilder was addressing the media in Cape Town this week on the last day of a regional meeting of the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM).
"As a country, obviously we are facing the primary challenge of redressing the imbalances that our history has caused to our country, in the first place of growing our economy [and] providing services to our people", Gilder said.
"Therefore, as we grapple with our immigration policy, we do so in the context that first and foremost we must make life better for our people."
During this year, Gilder said, the government would launch a process of reviewing a visa regime "largely inherited from the bad old days".
He said the GCIM had provided South Africa with ideas on how such a visa regime could be structured and organised to reflect real partnerships between countries or regions in relation to the SADC protocol.
South Africa is currently in discussion with neighbouring countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe on visa requirements.
Proper management of migration, Gilder said, was not only about making it easy for "rich white people" to move around because they had skills and money. It was about managing migration in order to develop the country and the entire continent.
GCIM co-chair Jan Karlsson said the global view of migration should become less Eurocentric. "We should be a little more Afrocentric, I mean that African countries should see first of all that the labour market is global.
"What we are learning more and more in these hearings is to get away from this Eurocentric or rich world's orientation that they are stealing our people instead of seeing that we are part of the same global labour market", Karlsson said.
The GCIM, the first ever global panel to address international migration, is an independent body comprising 18 internationally renowned members drawn from all regions, bringing together a wide range of migration perspectives and expertise.
The United Nations and a core group of interested governments launched the GCIM in Geneva in 2003.
The commission is conducting five broad-based regional hearings with African governments, migration experts, NGOs, trade unions and other stakeholders in order to get information on migration trends, policies and challenges across the continent.
Source: BuaNews
