With anti-immigrant sentiment becoming increasingly controversial, the man at the helm of SA’s latest bid to secure its borders has a mammoth task ahead of him.
Dr Nakampe Masiapato, commissioner of SA’s new Border Management Authority, is tasked with consolidating the various government departments that play a role in border control.
He admits the current situation is not working.
“I can give you a practical example of the challenges at OR Tambo International Airport. You had a port manager for immigration, a port manager for SAPS, a port manager for Sars, health, agriculture, environment,” he says.
“None of those people talk to each other. So it is logical that kind of environment will be compromised from a security point of view and otherwise.”
Under the new system, police will not be stationed at ports and their roles will be taken over by the BMA border guards.
“Obviously, if there is a crime scene at one of our ports, or intelligence gives them information on something that will happen, they are welcome to enter our environment,” Masiapato says.
“Under normal circumstances anywhere in the world basic port access control is not necessarily a police function. It is just basic access control — making sure everything is in order.”
Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi unveiled the first 200 cohorts of the BMA border guards last month.
Masiapato has many years experience in intelligence and border control.
“In 1994 border management was not even close to being one of the priorities. Most of the issues that we were looking at were more internal. At one point home affairs was not seen as one of the critical departments. From a national security point of view, that was the genesis of an era.”
From 2008 it was becoming clear the way in which we have been managing borders in this country was very problematic.
— Nakampe Masiapato
Home affairs is “supposed to be central to issues of national security”.
“But of course we looked at it as just some clerks that scroll and stamp passports. But over time things changed.
“From 2008 it was becoming clear the way we have been managing borders in this country was very problematic.”
“He said 2008 was the apex of Zimbabwe’s collapse. The Zimbabwean dollar died that year,” Masiapato says.
He experienced first-hand the effects of that country’s resulting financial implosion.
“In 2008 the Zimbabwe dollar collapsed and Zimbabweans started flooding in and our systems were not ready. It became clear we had to do things differently. I was effectively working for defence intelligence at the time and was part of the contingent deployed by Sadc to observe the elections with people from Dirco, Cosatu and so on.”
But the flooding of our borders was a seed planted in his brain. “A year after that I moved to the National Intelligence Co-ordinating Committee, and that is where we made the decision that we move away from the multi-agency approach.”
Masiapato, who has served on several border-related forums such as the Border Control Operational Co-ordinating Committee and Inter-Agency Clearing Forum created for the 2020 Soccer World Cup, holds two PhDs — one in public management and the other in governance — as well as a master’s degree in public administration.
He has completed the National Security Programme with the National Defence College.
Masiapato served as the acting national coordinator for intelligence. He has served over 19 years within the justice, crime prevention and security cluster (JCPS), 12 of which he worked at a senior management level.
“The only way was to do away with a multi-agency approach. If you look at the deployment that happened at the ports of entry, though unconsciously, we ended up with the department of home affairs on the ground doing immigration, then you have the department of health, Sars, the department of environmental affairs dealing with biosecurity issues such as the movement of fauna and flora.
“We had about seven structures on the ground that, as far as management was concerned, would have some role or another. There is no law that says they must talk to each other. They are just deployed there. So everybody is doing their own work and responsibilities.”
This, Masiapato says, also has a corrupt ripple effect. “When they had to do the work, people started to compete against each other to see which area or section generates the most cash from a corruption point of view.”
Boredom can sometimes be key. “I always use the example that if you want to argue that the police must sit there full-time, it is like saying we must deploy a contingent of police to deploy full-time in Menlyn Mall. What would be the purpose?
“We need to actually create a structure whose responsibility will exclusively be the management of our borders. The departments will still be in charge of laws and policy, but we will implement these laws,” Masiapato says.
But to do that, they had to start from scratch.
“You cannot easily create a law where you will effectively infuse everything. So you make one law, that becomes a bit of an omnibus law, on the basis of border management. And that is what became the Border Authority Act.
“The act has to say, this is how we are going to manage the borders, this is the mechanism . Then you go to the respective departments and identify sections in their laws that have to do with operational border management on the ground. You take those sections and congregate them, and the president writes a proclamation and moves those functions from those departments to the BMA.
“So BMA is there as a front office for a number of departments in the background. Their responsibility is to implement those various laws from a border security point of view.
“For now, the law says Sars will also be there. SANDF will be outside the borderline and the police will be called from the nearest station.”
Masiapato says not being deployed at border ports will free the SANDF and police to keep a more watchful eye on the rest of the border fence.
“The BMA border guards will take care of those responsibilities — the main one in particular is border law enforcement on the ground.
“The departments will still be responsible for policy and the law. I always use the example of Covid. When the disease struck, it took the department of health, from a policy point of view, together with the cabinet, to say that for people to come into SA we need negative test results. If you do not have that, you have to do a rapid test on the ground. That’s a policy issue. They will still make the policies, and BMA will enforce them.”
In the past, with the different departments came different experts in their fields.
“BMA will have generalists but also a lot of specialists. You will still have environmental health practitioners, immigration specialists, security and others. They will all be integrated into BMA.
“We are a multidisciplinary structure, but what we want to achieve is a single command and control, so there is a character of function and character of purpose.
“There will, for instance, be someone who is an expert on immigration issues. Let’s say someone says he is running away from his country and he is claiming asylum. You can’t just have someone who normally does access-control handle such a specialised issue. You need an expert on immigration issues who knows what section of the Immigration Act must be applied.”
He sees many positives in a more centralised approach.
“If a person dies outside our jurisdiction but is South African, that person must be flown into the country, the remains must be assessed by a qualified pathologist. BMA will have pathologists, and they will be given a place in, for instance, OR Tambo where they can do their work. To make sure this is not some ploy to bring drugs into the country.
“As we speak we do not have that. If the remains come through, it is taken to some mortuary in Kempton Park. A lot can happen between the airport and the mortuary.”
But most of SA’s immigration woes stem from porous physical borders, all 472,000km of them.
During a recent visit to Musina in Limpopo, half-an-hour from Beitbridge border port, locals told TimesLIVE Premium that the going rate to smuggle an immigrant across the river is R500.
“The areas around our borders are infested with civilian activities. We will be working closely with SANDF and the police on this.”
Asked about areas with high crime potential, such as the 40km stretch of the Lesotho border where the fence has disappeared, Masiapato nods.
“But again, over and above that, we will also be in areas we call the vulnerable segments of the population. Those areas could be identified by the SANDF working together with us, and we will agree that we must deploy the border guards in those areas to make sure we deal with the criminality that is taking place there.
He says another critical area of deployment is villages that straddle the border. “In certain instances that border fence doesn’t exist.”
The last thing Masiapato wants is for his border guards to spend their days chasing grandmothers doing grocery shopping.
“Our responsibility is not to stop people from those movements. The responsibility is to manage those activities and make sure no criminality happens in that space.”
His border guards will be spread out across the 72 border posts in SA, but will be focused on “vulnerable segments”.
“These are Beitbridge, Skukuza, Lebombo, Oshoek, Khosi Bay and Maseru. These are areas where we know intervention is needed urgently.”
With 200 border guards employed by the BMA, Masiapato hopes that number will reach more than 1,000 by the time their incubation period in the home affairs department ends in March 2023.
“After that, we will be our own entity.”
