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Ebenezer Odei will soon have the time to raise the funds needed to attend university in 2019. Odei is a baccalaureate student at Grbady Park High School, GroundUp reported.
His parents are Ghanaian and arrived in South Africa in 1996. They obtained permanent resident status in 1997. Odei was born in South Africa in 2000 but does not have permanent resident status because his mother says not having been duly informed by the Ministry of the Interior. the required process.
You may think that anyone born in the republic is automatically a citizen, but as the Odei situation shows, it is more complicated than that.
Odei said he should apply for funding from the National Student Financial Assistance Scheme (NSFAS) because his family could not afford to pay for university studies. However, to qualify for NSFAS, the applicant must have a South African identity card. And to apply for an identity card as a foreigner, you must have a permanent residence permit.
According to Interior spokesman Thabo Mokgola, Odei's parents were supposed to bring Odei's handwritten birth certificate to the Ghanaian embbady to obtain a pbadport .
He added that the parents then had to return to internal affairs so that Odei would be placed in the Ministry's files in order to grant him the same status as his parents, the one of permanent residence.
"Nobody informed me of this process"
"When he turns 18, he can then apply for South African citizenship," Mokgola said.
Odei's mother, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, said that although she was using the handwritten letter to obtain a Ghanaian pbadport for Odei, she did not know that they had to return to the department to put it in his files. Instead, they applied for a temporary residence permit in Odei in order to regularize his stay in the country.
"Nobody informed me of this process (that it was necessary to ask the Ministry of the Interior to register Odei in his files) .I was fighting only to renew the temporary residence permit. "said Elizabeth. She stated that Odei's father had died in 2014 and that she could not pay the university fees.
According to Elizabeth, they have repeatedly tried, unsuccessfully, to renew Odei's temporary residence permit. Odei said he had to go through a lawyer to get a confirmation letter from the Ministry of the Interior allowing him to stay in the country. The letter is valid until the end of November 2018.
Mokgola said Odei must first legalize his stay in the country by applying for a temporary residence visa before he can apply for a permanent residence permit. He clarified that the average processing time for an application for permanent residence is eight months, but that the department can make an exception to speed up the processing of an application.
"With the matrix results normally published the first week of January, there are [less than] he had eight weeks left to collect all the necessary documents for the applications and submit them to the DHA (Department of the Interior) for processing. Although this is not an impossible situation, the time is short for the ministry to help, "said Mokgola.
However, the deadline for NSFAS 2019 applications is November 30th.
"I'm doing very well in my studies and I still hope to succeed in my graduation exams," said Odei, who wants to study accounting.
"My hopes are broken."
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