________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ AJSW, Volume 9 Number 1 2019 NCUBE, N.; CHIMBWANDA, T.; & NCUMISA, W. DISCUSSION Tongogara Refugee Camp: a context of fragility There is need to draw attention to the children in the Tongogara Refugee Camp. Children make up more than half (52%) of the total refugee population in the Camp. The Camp hosts 127 not of concern persons, 73 (57%) of these persons are children. While the camps hosts 3 263 asylum seekers and 1 711 (52%) are children under the age of 18 excluding not of concern persons. Asylum seekers and not of concern persons inhabit the transient space of grey borderlands they await the award of Refugee status or repeal of the decision on their application for Refugee status. The notion of a grey borderland is adapted from Sassen’s (1991) notion of the ‘border zone’ referring to an area where ‘where the old spatialities and temporalities of the national and the new ones of the global digital age engage’ and highlights the obscure and uncertain space where nationalities engage and are renegotiated through the application for legal citizenship. By way of illustration, the ID documentation of refugees classifies them either as ‘Alien’ or ‘Refugee’ – terms that are ‘other’ to the ordinary citizen, and as a result they must continue to negotiate their lives within a context which does not offer them full citizen rights. Children within the refugee camp remain fixed within this fragile context, as this camp is constituted by generations of refugees. Whilst the Tongogara Refugee is camp is named after Zimbabwean liberation struggle veteran, Josiah Tongogara; the verb ‘tongogara’ is the future perfect tense in Shona for ‘we will (just) stay’. Hence in this context, seems almost sardonicallyladen with a kind of resignation in the present reminiscent of the future continuous tense – as if to signify the perpetuity of generational refugeeism. Nonetheless, in spite of this inability to access basic human rights and services in the refugee camp, the precarious and protracted nature of refugeeism keeps them suspended in a state of temporary permanence as even their refugee status may be revoked and refugees repatriated at any such time as the status they hold is nullified by conditions such as stability and the end of war. The lack of durable solutions for long stay refugees means status withdrawal hangs like a guillotine, above their heads. They are thus in a permanent yet temporary state. Our concept of the refugee camp as a grey borderland is echoic of what Scott (1985) would call ‘hidden scripts’, which are like ‘loop holes’ and ‘interstices’ (Lee, 2010), where norms are subverted and ‘temporariness’ can become permanent (Ncube, 2014). Recent arrival trends show that the highest number of refugee children (including asylum seekers) aged 0-17 years hail from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and Rwanda. 739 girls and 820 boys enrolled at Tongogara Primary School – making a total of 1 559 children. Zimbabwe adopts an encampment policy and therefore, refugees and asylum seekers are confined to refugee camps unless extreme circumstances exist which require them to live in urban areas. These circumstances may include employment or the need of medical treatment. Birth registrations: the right to a name and nationality While the Government of Zimbabwe has taken commendable steps, as presented in the Zimbabwe’s second periodic report submitted by States parties under Article 44 of the UNCRC, to ensure birth registration for children, the overall birth registration situation in the country could be improved. In 2008, the national birth registration rate for Zimbabwe was only 42% – 56% in urban areas and 35% for rural areas (ZIMSTAT & ICF International, 2016). This disparity is largely due to the limited capacity of civil authorities. This challenge is amplified in rural areas where proximity to a civil authority for birth registration may is further than it is in urban areas. In fact, a comparison of the 2005-06 with the 2010-11 ZDHS revealed that the percentage of children under the age of 5 whose births were registered had dropped sharply from 74% to 49% (CSO & Macro International 2007; ZIMSTAT & ICF, 2012). The 2015 ZDHS indicated that the birth registration rate in Zimbabwe for children below the age of 5 year is 84%. In 2011 the UNHCR anticipated that only 70% of new-born children born in the refugee camp would be issued birth certificates due to a funding deficit (UNHCR, 2015). Symptoms Zimbabwe’s weak state capacity are witnessed in the fluctuation in national birth registrations; less than optimal issue birth certificates for children whose birth are registered. As a consequence of Zimbabwe’s status as a fragile state, the national and international obligation to register every child’s birth within the Camp is contingent on donor funding. In order be to attain a universal birth registration rate in Zimbabwe, there is need to focused measures to be put in place. In many cases, access to socio-economic rights is hindered by the lack of documentation. For example: birth registration is also linked to the right to education (Article 28 of the UNCRC), as children cannot be enrolled in schools outside the camp without a birth certificate. The growing population of the camp has resulted in the camp not having the capacity to cater to the needs of the refugee community. Thus members of the refugee community sometimes take recourse to access healthcare from the local health facilities outside the camp. However, without proof of birth registration for example in the form of a birth certificate, unregistered children of refugees and asylum seekers from the Camp may be turned away from schools and health facilities. For instance in 2014, there was a secondary school shortage in Chipinge, as they only have one high school which can only accommodate 800 students (UNHCR, 2015). Birth registration was employed as exclusion criteria and as a result, 200 children from the African Journal of Social Work, 9(1), 2019 68 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________