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Tens of thousands of migrants are waiting at a farm site outside Musina, South Africa — and the buses can’t come fast enough.
South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs has confirmed that at least 50 buses are being deployed to the Musina repatriation centre near the Beitbridge Border Post, as pressure mounts to process a growing crowd of Zimbabwean, Malawian and Congolese nationals waiting to return home. Estimates from humanitarian teams put the number of people currently being processed at between 25,000 and 30,000 — a figure that keeps shifting as more arrivals come in daily.
The operation is unfolding at the Proefplaas Temporary Repatriation Centre, a farm site roughly 20 kilometres outside Musina. It became South Africa’s official repatriation hub after the Durban Repatriation Centre shut down. KZN Home Affairs official Cyril Mncwabe confirmed that all provinces are now funnelling people to this single site. “All the provinces are sending people here,” he said, acknowledging that the surge is stretching officials thin. Around 100 Home Affairs staff have been deployed on the ground, and Mncwabe estimates the operation could run for another month — depending on how many more people continue to arrive.
Why are so many people leaving at once?
The mass movement follows a sharp escalation in anti-migrant sentiment across South Africa. Anti-migrant organisations have ramped up calls for undocumented foreigners to leave the country, while protests and community-level tensions have pushed many migrants to flee their homes. “People continue to arrive because they fear for their lives,” Mncwabe said, “or because of developments taking place in the communities where they have been living.” Some foreign nationals were formally deported; others chose to leave voluntarily rather than wait for the situation to worsen.
Since the South African government intensified its migration management programme, more than 35,000 people have already been processed through Beitbridge. Border Management Authority Acting Commissioner Maj Gen David Chilembe said roughly 2,400 people were processed in a single day this week alone — around 1,700 Malawian nationals and 700 Zimbabweans. Mozambican nationals have already been sent home; the focus now is on clearing the remaining Zimbabwean and Malawian groups.
One of the sharpest bottlenecks is cross-border coordination. Malawian nationals cannot simply cross into Zimbabwe and continue home on their own — their government needs to formally take over the process at the border. Chilembe was direct about the problem: “The Malawian authorities appear to be overwhelmed by the high numbers.” With receiving countries struggling to absorb the pace of returns, the logjam on the South African side deepens.
The human cost of this bottleneck is real. Women, children and other vulnerable people are among those spending days at Proefplaas without adequate shelter, waiting for transport or travel documents to come through. The scale and speed of this operation are testing every layer of the system — from South African officials managing the processing, to neighbouring governments scrambling to receive their citizens, to the migrants themselves, caught in the middle of a political storm they did not start.
