Human trafficking of children shocks

As a South African and a parent, I was among those who were shocked when the country’s Border Management Agency commissioner Mike Masiapato revealed that border police at Beit Bridge stopped and searched 42 buses from Zimbabwe which were ferrying 443 children into the country.

Some of the children were as young as 8.

What staggers and stuns the mind is that none of these children were unaccompanied by their parents, relatives or guardians, nor were they under any adult supervision.

Whatever the truth might be regarding the saga of the 42 busses and their human cargo remains a worrying factor to anyone who is a parent both in South Africa as well as the parents of these children.

The fact that these children were not accompanied by their biological parents, guardians or family relatives, makes this entire incident even more sinister if not outright suspicious of child trafficking.

Worse still, the flimsy explanation offered by Zimbabwean officials on local radio stations about who these children were, where they came from and why they were coming into the country leaves even much bigger questions.

In fact, this is not the first time that a group of unaccompanied children from Zimbabwe have been found bundled in a vehicle inside the borders of South Africa.

A few years ago, a similar incident was reported by the local media after a combi was intercepted in the northwest province also ferrying undocumented children, also believed to be from Zimbabwe.

While some Zimbabwe officials also attest to the suspicion that the children may have been trafficked into South Africa, an unnamed organisation purported to be representing foreign nationals living in South Africa has claimed that the children were being sent to visit their parents, who are said to be working in South Africa to spend Christmas with their parents.

It is an undeniable fact that there are an estimated one million Zimbabweans who live in South Africa, many of them illegally.

There is also an undeniable fact that the majority of many young children, some of them below the age of five, are being used to solicit money and food from unsuspecting South African motorists on street corners as beggars.

This phenomenon was previously unheard of in this country prior to the flood of undocumented immigrants from across the Limpopo border.

Reliable sources have confirmed that, once in South Africa, these children are brought to cities such as Jo’burg to be rented out to unscrupulous people and used to solicit money from motorists at street corners.

“We denied them entry and activated the Zimbabwean officials to process them back into Zimbabwe,” Masiapato was reported to have told the local media. Concerned South Africans should praise the border officials at Beit Bridge for intervening in this blatant form of child trafficking by refusing the buses entry into South Africa.

The statement by Ngqabutho Mabhena, chairperson of the Africa Diaspora Forum, which represents foreign nationals living in South Africa, who claim that he believes the buses were ferrying the children from Zimbabwean to visit their parents working in South Africa, should be taken with a pinch of salt of not downright rejected as a fabrication.

How on earth is this possible and which parents or family in their right frame of mind would allow a child as young as 8 to be bundled into a bus with 442 other young children to be ferried in a bus and travel 1 400km to a foreign country without supervision?