How Home Affairs broke a refugee in SA
BY DIANE BEAMISH
On Wednesday, June 6, a young refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo by the name of Vanneaux Kongolo took his life. It was an act of total despair and desperation.

Vanneaux Kongolo, a physiotherapist from the DRC, performs voluntary work in Johannesburg. He committed suicide on June 6 after being repeatedly stonewalled by the Department of Home Affairs.
Vanneaux was a person of great integrity, with a fixation for truth and justice. This is why as a student in DRC he got involved in opposition politics, to fight abuse and corruption in the Kabila government. He was a very strong character. It would take a lot to bring him to this.
He fled from the DRC in 2006. In February that year he had been on his way, with two friends, to a political meeting. As they stopped to buy some airtime, soldiers spotted his car and shot at it. Vanneaux was not inside the car, but the soldiers killed one companion and wounded the other. Someone sent him a text message, warning him to stay inside the shop.
Vanneaux escaped out of the back door. Knowing that he could no longer stay in the DRC, because his life was seriously threatened, he soon left his country and came to South Africa.
To receive recognition as a refugee the international criteria require that one had to flee from one’s country for reason of political persecution or war, and that one’s life would be threatened if one returned.
Clearly Vanneaux qualified on both criteria. And yet, against all justice, his request for refugee status was rejected by South African authorities. For Vanneaux , this was a death sentence.
As a result of this unfair rejection, Vanneaux was unable to get registered with the Health Council to perform his profession, physiotherapy (this was a cause of tremendous suffering to him). He had very great difficulty in opening a bank account and so on.
We appealed against the rejection and I sat with him through his appeal in May 2008. The lawyer/judge was completely understanding of his situation and we assumed he had granted Vanneaux refugee status—but the Department of Home Affairs never gave it to him. Every enquiry produced the same answer: that they had never received any outcome from the Appeal Board.
Vanneaux’s situation became increasingly worse. One day he was attacked outside Mercy House, a home for refugees in Johannesburg which I founded in the 1990s and where he lived for most of his time in South Africa. In the attack his refugee permit was stolen.
When Home Affairs reprinted it, they oddly gave him a new ID number, to our great distress. So when he went to the bank where we had been able to open an account for him, he was not allowed to withdraw his money, in spite of an affidavit from the police confirming the attack.
He walked around, desperately, for months, unable to draw on his salary. That account was closed. In January this year, I managed to open a new account for him at another bank. After a few weeks he went, with enormous relief, to collect his ATM card. But when he got there the bank officials told him that they had a new regulation and could not give him his card until the Department of Home Affairs would verify his document.
Because we knew that this would not happen, that regulation effectively closes banking to refugees. That experience was another death sentence.
I then went back to first bank, where he had his original account, and explained to the situation to the manager. She said that she would help him to reopen his account and gave him an appointment for Saturday May 26, at 08:00. When Vanneaux arrived at the appointed time he was told that the manager had not come to work. No one helped him.
He went home deeply disappointed. I called the manager again, and she made another appointment, for Saturday, June 2. Vanneaux later told me that he had not even gone to the appointment, because he was feeling too depressed to even try.
Two days after that conversation this brave, kind and ultimately desperate man took his own life.
As I am writing and as you are reading this, there are thousands of refugees sleeping outside Home Affairs offices in desperate attempts to get in tomorrow morning. Young refugees are walking around as illegal aliens, in spite of going to Home Affairs every day and even sleeping outside in the cold. But they cannot even get inside, or when they do, they are told to come back another day.
The stream of refugees entering South Africa started just after the genocide in Rwanda, in late 1994. At the time the government decided to incorporate and integrate refugees into society, rather than isolating them in refugee camps. Treating refugees in the way that is happening now fails to fulfil that mandate.
The path to integration is blocked all the way by obstacles, demoralising refugees. Some give up hope on life, as the much-loved Vanneaux did.
Vanneaux gave up hope on life. The causes of all the problems in his attempt to simply survive in South Africa emanated from the fact that Home Affairs unjustly denied him refugee status — a status for which in international law he qualified and which would have enabled him to lead a normal life and contribute to society with his much-needed skills.
Vanneaux Kongolo was a solid, courageous and strong character. It would take a lot to break him, but this did.
See also the editorial “Dying of hope”
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