No joy for my baby with no SA birth certificate
Home Affairs’ response is cold comfort for parents who seek papers
MY WIFE and I have been following with interest, the article in your paper written by Bronwyn Davids (“SAHRC to review birth certificates”, Cape Argus, April 10) regarding children born in South Africa to foreign nationals who are being rendered stateless without valid documentation.
Of notable interest was the part about the South African Human Rights Commission looking into the issue.
The Home Affairs statement tends to simplify the issue when it comes to children born in South Africa to parents who are permanent residents: “Children born of permanent residents follow their parents’ status. We do not separate children from parents.”
This wrongly implies that challenges are only faced by children whose foreign parents are in South Africa illegally and are undocumented.
Allow me to cite the example of my fourmonth-old daughter, Nomthandazo. I have forwarded this example to the SAHRC and they promised to assess it. My wife and I live in Welkom in the Free State and are Zimbabwean citizens who are permanent residents here. We have South African non-citizen IDs.
Our first-born son was born in 2014 and was granted automatic SA citizenship by virtue of being born to permanent residents and because the amendments in the Citizenship Amendment Act 17 of 2010 had not yet been effected.
Nomthandazo was born in December when the SA Citizenship Amendment Act 17 of 2010 was now in effect. She was issued with an unabridged but handwritten birth certificate that has no ID number on it. Under the terms of the amended law, she may only apply for citizenship when she turns 18.
We have been advised by Home Affairs to apply for a Zimbabwean passport and birth certificate for her. The forms for these are issued and approved at the Zimbabwe Consulate in Joburg, but the actual submission and processing must be done in Zimbabwe. When the Zimbabwean authorities have issued these two documents, we will then have to apply for Nomthandazo to be given a South African Relative’s Permit.
This must be done at the offices of Home Affairs agents, VFS Global and the office nearest to us is in Bloemfontein. The permit application will take up to two months to process. Only when she has the relative’s permit, will Nomthandazo qualify to apply for permanent residence, and that will be a further eight to 12 months of waiting before she becomes a permanent resident.
We have emails from Home Affairs and VFS Global stating this process. The process is further complicated if the child and parents live far from their country’s consulate or embassy. Time must be found off work and money must be raised to travel there and to courier the processed forms to one’s home country.
So far, we have tried to get our daughter to join a Discovery Medical Aid scheme and the application was rejected because she does not have an ID number or passport number. (An email from Discovery rejecting the application is available). Our daughter’s right to be covered by a medical aid scheme and receive private hospital care in the event of an emergency has been compromised and will continue to be compromised until the lengthy process of getting all required documents has been finalised.
We have encountered several difficulties at our local clinic when taking her for immunisation. Once again, the battle is due to her not having an ID number and their computerised system requires an ID number. A favour was done by one clinic to create a 13 digit number for her to be added to the system but because no ID number appears on her clinic card, we still face resistance and hostility from clinic staff whenever they have to attend to her.
An attempt to include Nomthandazo on our Hollard Insurance funeral cover has also failed because of the same reason.
Hollard informed us that even if she gets a relative’s permit or permanent residence permit, the lack of an ID number will still be a disqualifying factor.
If a misfortune of death was to suddenly occur before she gets an ID number, we would face the nightmare of financing funeral expenses from our pockets. It would also be problematic to process burial documents.
Conflicting reports have been given to us in our telephonic enquiries to both VFS Global and Home Affairs offices.
Some officials tell us that when Nomthandazo is eventually granted permanent residence, she will be able to apply for a non-citizen birth certificate which will bear an ID number, yet others say that she will only receive an ID number when she applies for an ID at the appropriate stage.
Either way this is all in the future, for now and for over a year from now, without the all-important 13-digit ID number, she will still struggle in a similar way as children born to temporary residents or illegal immigrants.
Clearly, it is not only children of illegal immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and temporary residents who are affected by these latest laws.
Permanent residents’ children are also affected, especially in the early years of their lives.
Home Affairs does not take into account that from the second that a child is born, he or she needs to have the right to unhindered access to medical facilities, medical aid cover, insurance cover, and other essential services.
Sourcing birth certificates and passports from the parent’s country of origin is not an overnight thing and during the interim period, the child is denied the right to these essential services.
Before the amended laws, a birth certificate was issued upon birth and these children were never left vulnerable for an extended period of time. There is an urgent need for a review of this status quo for the sake of these little souls.