One of the main reasons Saffas need visas to enter the UK is because of the fact that many SA passports have been and are being forged – many of them by members of the Department of Home Affairs for profit.
South African Home Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa says his department will be conducting an investigation into reports that one of the suspects in the deadly attack may have travelled to Kenya using a forged South African passport.
Here in the UK the The Guardian newspaper reported that Kenyan officials are investigating whether UK born Samantha Lewthwaite was part of a terror cell connected to the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab, which planned to target the city of Mombasa in 2013. Lewthwaite is the widow of one of the 2005 London Underground bombers, Germaine Lindsay.
Mamoepa said: “Reports are saying a white terrorist was killed in that shootout.” South Africa would work with the Kenyan authorities to study the passport.
Lewthwaite, 29, is said to have regularly travelled to South Africa and stayed in Indian suburbs of Johannesburg earlier this year.
While the attack in Nairobi and the loss of life is indeed tragic, it is also really bad news for SA passport holders. Saffas have a real hard time travelling on SA Passports, commonly referred to as “green mambas”. SA Promo earlier this month reported that the UK’s foreign secretary William Hague said “progress” has been made to enhancing border security” with regards to South Africans entering the UK.
Annoying – and expensive – British visa requirements were introduced in 2008 in the wake of terrorist activity to tighten UK border security. Not only do SA visitors to the UK need visas, the working holiday visa for young people was scrapped and requirements for other tiers of visas tightened. At the time the UK also argued that the SA passport was not secure and that many none Saffas made it into the UK with false SA passports. SA was warned about this several times, to no avail.
Should the existence of a forged SA passport on one of the attackers be true, this will be one massive setback to any progress of getting the UK visas requirements scrapped. It could even provoke even more countries to require stricter visa requirements for Saffas.
