Sudan preparing for influx of deportees from Saudi Arabia

November 10, 2013 (KHARTOUM) – The Sudanese Expatriates Affairs Organ (EAO) has formed an emergency committee to follow up on the conditions of the deportees from Saudi Arabia and announced its readiness to facilitate their entry through coordination with the relevant authorities.

The emergency committee held a meeting on Sunday headed by the director of Immigration, Communities, and Organizations at the EAO, Hassan Babiker Ahmed.

Babiker disclosed a set of arrangements between the EAO, the Sudanese Council of Ministers, ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs, and Sudan Customs authorities to facilitate the entry of the returnees besides coordination with the ministries of Public Education and Higher Education to accommodate their children too.

He added that the committee is following the situation closely and making constant contacts with the Sudanese embassy in Riyadh and Sudan’s General Consulate in Jeddah to follow the developments in order to meet the returnees’ needs.

The Saudi government has started to enforce a long-disregarded rule that expatriates can work only for their sponsor. The aim is to close a loophole allowing companies to get around strict new quotas that determine how many Saudis they employ.

Last Tuesday, al-Khartoum daily newspaper reported that unofficial figures show that there 900,000 Sudanese migrant workers in Saudi Arabia of which 600,000 are in compliance with labor and immigration laws which means that around 300,000 could likely face deportation.

The Sudanese embassy had said that the Saudi decision was not aimed only at the Sudanese nationals but expats from all countries, pointing that numbers of the returnees reported by some news media were incorrect.

The Sudanese embassy in Riyadh said in a press statement that it issued around 40,500 emergency travel documents, stressing that it incurred all financial expenses of the returnees who didn’t have money.

Sudanese workers abroad especially in the Arab Gulf countries are one of the main sources of hard currency through their remittances they send to their families.

Since the secession of oil-rich south in July 2011, Sudan’s reserves of hard currency started to dry up thus making the local currency fall to its lowest level to record last month.

(ST)