JOHANNESBURG – The Border Management Authority (BMA) says it wants to end the perception that the country’s borders are porous.
In April this year, BMA was formally established as a schedule 3A public entity charged with the managing and security of the country’s borders.
The BMA commissioner, Dr Mike Masiapato, held a media briefing Thursday to outline the entity’s plans on strengthening South Africa’s 72 ports of entry.
Many political parties and more recently, the governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), said the country’s borders were not secure and this had led to an uncontrollable situation of illegal migration.
Masiapato said many members of the public also shared these sentiments.
He said these perceptions were based on people’s reality.
“The establishment of the first Border Management Authority is the first recognition of that reality and it is therefore the challenge of the BMA to make sure we start doing things differently and overall start to address the issue of the porousness of the borders.”
With minimal data available on illegal immigrants in the country, Masiapato said it was difficult to determine the scale of the problem they had been entrusted to solve.