REGISTRAR-General (RG) Tobaiwa Mudede yesterday said people referred to as aliens were clearly not citizens, adding that being issued with a birth certificate did not guarantee one citizenship.
BY VENERANDA LANGA
Mudede had appeared before the Parliamentary Thematic Committee on Peace and Security to speak on the blitz by his department to issue out birth certificates and national identity cards in preparation for the biometric voter registration exercise.
“Aliens are aliens and they are not citizens, and in most countries of the world, including Sadc, they only have rights to vote when they are registered to be citizens,” he said.
“Citizenship of a country gives you various rights, including a right to be a President, and presently, there is a case in Australia, where the Deputy Prime Minister is having a problem of being labelled a non-citizen.”
Mudede said a child born of foreign parents takes citizenship of those parents.
But if one of the parents is a Zimbabwean, the child can get Zimbabwean citizenship.
He said it was the same for Zimbabweans who bear children in neighbouring countries like South Africa and Botswana, where they relocated to work and where their children are not considered South Africans or Tswanas.
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Mudede said if the RG’s Office was lax about issues of citizenship, they would create problems for Zimbabwe and end up giving citizenship to refugees or some criminal elements.
But, he said, it was possible for one to apply for citizenship status and renounce their foreign citizenship.
On reports that people from Matabeleland affected by the Gukurahundi massacres were failing to get birth certificates, Mudede dismissed this as false.
“I personally went to Matabeleland to look for those people so that I issue them with the birth documents and none of them came with such problems,” he said.
“The children in question are now 35 to 37 years old and it is not true that they do not have those documents.”
The RG said as at October 27, a total 398 898 people were issued with IDs in all provinces.
A total of 438 386 were issued with birth certificates, while 13 593 were issued with death certificates.
Bulawayo recorded the lowest registrations with 8 920 for IDs, 5 343 for birth certificates and 593 for death certificates, while Midlands had the highest figures with 94 712 for IDs, 76 048 for birth certificates and 1 875 for death certificates.
Mudede said the reasons were that Midlands was highly populated.
