Soldiers doing the hard yards on largely inhospitable border territory with Mozambique and Zimbabwe prevented 1 675 people from illegally entering South Africa in December. This is 1 370 more than were intercepted by soldiers deployed on the border protection tasking Operation Corona in November last year along the same national land borders.

All told the December “haul” of illegal immigrants handed to Department of Home Affairs (DHA) immigration officials and the SA Police Service (SAPS) in December totalled 1 850. A hundred and thirty-eight Basuto illegals were stopped on the Eastern Cape and Free State borders with landlocked Lesotho. With the exception of a lone Namibian, small numbers of illegals from Mozambique, Eswatini (36 stopped along the KwaZulu-Natal borders with both neighbouring countries) and 10 from Botswana found their plans to be in South Africa stymied by men and women wearing camouflage.

In total, soldiers confiscated narcotics and contraband worth over R9.3 million from smugglers/traffickers operating on the Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe borders.

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