The Roads to Hillbrow by Nerio Ron;Halley Jean;

Author:Nerio, Ron;Halley, Jean;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Robert Michel—”A big economy” with “Great Depression levels of unemployment”

“A country with a big economy attracts,” says Robert Michel,27 the white CEO of the Outreach Foundation, a nonprofit that provides job training, counseling, and other services to people who live in Hillbrow. “But South Africa is no longer that. It is shedding jobs. Population growth last year [2019] was 3.8 percent, but economic growth was only .8 percent. That means the per capita income is shrinking.”

Robert warns that the implications of a shrinking economy are dire. Economic stresses lead to and exacerbate other problems. “South Africa’s economy is in free fall,” he says. “Unemployment is at an all-time high. If the unemployment in South Africa is thirty percent, it is forty to fifty percent in Hillbrow. Many buildings in Hillbrow are in ruins, where people are without water and lights. Violence and crime are at all-time highs. When there are ten to twelve to fifteen people living in flats, that breeds violence, especially gender-based violence. There is a huge amount of family violence. We run workshops to sensitize males and females to gender stereotypes. We try, but it is an uphill battle.”

Despite this bleak assessment, Robert adds that he is not about to give up. He believes that one-on-one relationships and social connections can make a difference.

Robert has worked in international development for twenty-five years and has spent time in thirty African countries. “I’ve worked in Kinshasa, Lagos, and Nairobi,” he says. “But Hillbrow is different. There are people from twenty-five nations living in Hillbrow. It is more like New York was in the late nineteenth century. Many are transient and they move on. Some go to other parts of South Africa. Others go to third countries, like Canada and the US, although they are a minority.”

He is visibly moved when he speaks about difficulties faced by long-term asylum seekers. “Many are here for ten to fifteen years,” he says. “But they are never made refugees, so they cannot work. The government has completely failed. The government has signed on to treaties, but it ignores them.”

Robert’s observations correspond with those of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The UNHCR reported in 2015 that South Africa has the largest number of pending asylum-seeker claims in the world. With 1,057,600 awaiting processing in 2015, South Africa holds nearly one-third of the world’s 3,200,000 unprocessed asylum seekers. During one particularly severe period of crisis in Zimbabwe, from 2007 to 2010, South Africa received more asylum seekers than any other country, with almost 150,000 Zimbabweans seeking asylum in 2009 alone. In addition, the UNHCR reports that 41,500 Somali asylum seekers and 32,600 asylum seekers from the DRC are living in South Africa.28 It should be noted that AfricaCheck, an independent fact-checking organization, refutes the UNHCR’s numbers. It estimates, instead, that the number of unprocessed asylum seekers is closer to 400,000. Even that lower number would leave South Africa with the second-highest number of asylum seekers in the world, behind Germany’s 420,625.29

In any

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