Malawi migrants return from SA empty-handed

BLANTYRE: Siphat Simali imagined that when she finally got back to Malawi she would return with pride and enough earnings from South Africa to support her two children and start a small business. Instead, the 28-year-old former domestic worker was bussed home empty-handed and shamefaced, one of a thousand to return last month after mass job losses in South Africa’s lockdown.

Nearly 10,000 Malawians have made the long journey home from South Africa since May, according to Malawi’s Department of Disaster Management Affairs, with more due in coming months as the coronavirus eats deeper into the world economy. “I have nothing now,” said Simali after she was spewed out of a packed bus and joined the rush for a nearby tap, parched by her three-day journey.

Some of her fellow passengers had spent their final rands on a bus ticket back, deciding it was better to be jobless at home, despite the indignity of returning empty-handed. The government paid for Simali’s passage home after she had spent months locked in a South African repatriation center, her documents expired along with all her savings. “I was struggling. We didn’t have enough to eat. All the things that I bought from my earnings I left them behind when I was detained,” Simali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the Mwanza border, an entry point into the country from Mozambique.

The coronavirus pandemic has decimated livelihoods across the globe, and with 85% of jobs in Africa classed as “informal employment”, the 55-nation African Union estimates some 20 million jobs will be threatened by the pandemic. In a pre-COVID-19 world where people followed the money, South Africa was a jobs magnet for nearby economies that could not support their own populations. —Reuters