“Over 500,000 Nigerians Live In South Africa As ‘Illegal Immigrants’ “
LAGOS SEPTEMBER 22ND (NEWSRANGERS)-The High Commissioner of Nigeria to South Africa, Ambassador Muhammad Haruna Manta has disclosed that over 500,000 Nigerians are living in South Africa as illegal immigrants.
According to him, some of the illegal immigrants came into South Africa through the border of Mozambique where there is no visa requirement into the country.
Manta made this disclosure on Friday at the headquarters of MTN in Johannesburg, during an interactive session with Nigerian journalists who are on a study trip to South Africa.
The journalists are the fellows of the second edition of the MTN Media Innovation Programme (MIP) at the School of Media and Communications of Pan-Atlantic University (PAU), Nigeria.
The High Commissioner listed the categories of Nigerians living in South Africa to include: professionals, students and illegal immigrants, who he described as “undocumented migrants”.
“We classified Nigerians living in South Africa into three groups, we have the students, those who came into South Africa because they gained admission into one school or the other. The second group are those we call the professionals.
“Part of that group of professionals also we have the industrialists or entrepreneurs, some of them are captains of industries, they are employers of labour. Then of course we now have those that came in, the unregistered migrants, they are undocumented migrants, those are the three broad categories of Nigerians we have here (South Africa).
“The first category that I talked about, as at the last count, we have about 2,900 0f them. They are professionals, including teachers, lecturers and doctors. Then the students, as of 2021, we had 5,000 plus of them in the various universities, but I understand that there may be 6,000 now.
“Then, of course, the ones that are unaccounted for, but they are Nigerians, we know them only from the language they speak, they are Nigerians, but other than that, they don’t carry any paper because the paper has since expired, they have never bothered to renew, even the passport, they have thrown it away, so those ones are the ones we call undocumented or unofficial migrants, those ones I just keep hearing as a High Commissioner, they gave me estimate like that, some of them said they are 600,000, some said they are over 500,000, but honestly I don’t have clear picture of those ones.
“If you go to Joburg almost every part of the town you will find Nigerians, actually I don’t know how many they are, but I’m told that they are over half a million”, the High Commissioner said.
NewTelegraph
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Posted by News Rangers
on Sep 22 2023. Filed under International, National.
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