________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ AJSW, Volume 9 Number 1 2019 NCUBE, N.; CHIMBWANDA, T.; & NCUMISA, W. partner that works towards ensuring that refugees realise rights such as healthcare, education, shelter and sanitation. TDH is responsible for the provision of water and sanitation services, healthcare, distribution of essential relief items and food, self-reliance and livelihood programme. TDH is committed to ensuring that the children remain in school at the refugee camp. It also offers them social protection services and support. These rights also include children’s rights such as birth registration, presentation and reduction of statelessness, and the protection of statelessness persons and child protection. As earlier alluded, the national context is also made increasingly fragile by donor dependency in terms of the provision of social protection for refugees in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s status as a fragile state raises questions around the sustainability of the country’s refugee policy implementation capabilities. For example, what would happen if the donors were to pull out? The fragility of this context is amplified by the fact that the refugee camp is located within an extremely fragile context of Manicaland Province which has a 70% poverty prevalence (ZIMSTAT & ICF International, 2016). Further to this, as aforementioned, Manicaland Province where Tongogara Refugee Camp is located has a birth registration rate that is 57% lower than the national average (ZIMSTAT & ICF International, 2016). Weak state capacity in the fragile state of Zimbabwe is witnessed in low birth registration rates for citizens, and the vulnerability of refugees and asylum seekers is exacerbated in this fragile with an even higher rate of poverty and lower birth registrations than the national averages. The confinement of refugees within the Tongogara Refugee Camp brings a range of citizenship alterities to the fore. Whilst the Refugees Act No. 13 of 1978 [Chapter 4:03] as amended by Act No. 22 of 2001 makes no mention of asylum seekers, disquietingly, the Refugees Act is entirely silent on children, and therein overlooks the vulnerabilities of children in contexts of fragility and forced displacement. This in effect contributes to undocumentation and statelessness particularly with regards to separated children and unaccompanied minors. As a result, children are marginalised by this legislative framework. Whilst the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Act No. 20 of 2013 provides wider protections for persons at risk of statelessness, gaps remain when considering the protections advanced by the 1961 Convention, to which the country has not acceded. For instance, while Section 38 of the Constitution, provides that persons continually residing in Zimbabwe for at least 10 years and satisfying certain conditions are entitled to apply for citizenship, the law does not entirely protect persons that are stateless or at risk of statelessness. However, there remain policy gaps such as the failure to grant citizenship to the children born of stateless parents. The fragility and vulnerability underpinned by statelessness is encapsulated by the notion of clandestinity. Clandestinity is a useful concept in that it captures the issue of exclusion based on ‘illegality, disenfranchisement ineligibility, and a permeability that fails to differentiate’ between types of citizenship alterities (Coutin, 1999:53). Refugees in Zimbabwe negotiate their lives within this fragile context where they experience varying degrees of ‘liminal citizenship’ and clandestinity can therefore be a barrier to social protection as it fails to differentiate between stateless persons and undocumented persons (Torres & Wicks-Ausbun, 2014). Children within the refugee camp remain fixed within this fragile context, as this camp is home to more than two generations of refugees. Thus, making them experience their refugee rights within the fixed pocket that is the fragile context of the camp as they do not possess the documentation that allows them access to a number of services like healthcare, education and judicial services. We argue that the Tongogara Refugee Camp is a fragile context in which the inhabitants are bound by the clandestinity and a transient permeability that fails to differentiate their varying degrees of (i)legality. This places them in an uncertain position that we describe as ‘temporary permanence’ (Ncube, 2014). Controversially, Agamben (1998) might posture to refugee camps as ‘modern concentration camp’. Within this grey borderland of the refugee camp of ‘bare life’, undocumented migrants are sometimes ‘reduced to a naked depoliticized state without official status and juridical rights’ (Agamben, 1998:57). As previously mentioned, ‘others of concern’ are children who inhabit grey borderlands by consequence of the prevalent cultural trend wherein children to refugees and asylum seekers are registered with the father’s nationality. As a result, it becomes difficult in future to naturalise these children under the mother’s nationality, thereby perpetuating this state of temporary permanence. Menj��var (2006) states that: Lengthy uncertain legal statuses determine if, how, and when immigrants will become fully legal and then citizens (through naturalization). Thus, spaces between conventional legal categories affect the immigrants’ immediate lives as well as long-term membership, thus raising the possibility of new forms of citizenship through migration. The temporary permanence of refugees including not of concern persons and other of concern persons is highlighted by their permeability between undocumented, asylum seeking, Alien and Refugee status. In this way they are suspended between resettlement and repatriation. African Journal of Social Work, 9(1), 2019 67 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________