The Home Affairs office at Rundu is inundated with stateless and undocumented persons who turned up for the mass registration process over the past few weeks. 

Stateless and undocumented people of all ages have been flooding the home affairs building in the hopes of getting registered and possibly qualifying for Namibian social grants. 

That is the word on the street, but the Deputy Director of Civil Registration in the northeast, Fillemon Shipena, says they have been misinformed. 

Shipena says about one thousand stateless and undocumented persons turn up here per day, making it difficult for the home affairs staff to render various other services to clients. 

"Some of them are even camping at the office; they want to sleep here. This registration will not close any time soon; it's an ongoing exercise, so they don't need to come and sleep at the office; they just need to wait." 

Kavango East has registered over 670 stateless and undocumented persons in the last 3 months. 

It's a drop in the ocean compared to the more than 50,000 people living in the two Kavango regions. 

When the group becomes too hard to handle, police are called in to assist with maintaining order. 

"Some of them are trying to be troublemakers, like trying to force entry into the offices, so that's why we thought it would be appropriate for us to get assistance from the police. So they are just there to render assistance to us." 

Most, if not all, of the stateless and undocumented people here claim they are from Angola and live in Namibia. 

Because they do not appear in the Angolan database, Shipena says the mass registration process includes taking their details and biometric information for the Namibian database. 

As to what will happen after they are all registered, this is what he had to say: "There will be an appropriate announcement to be done at an appropriate time, so for now, it's just to register them. Whatever is going to come out will be communicated by the right people, but it's not that the government is quiet with regards to their status."

Shipena is asking the stateless and undocumented to avoid flooding the office every day, adding that their registration does not have a deadline. 

For now, though, home affairs staff have their hands full and are currently working after hours to deal with the crowd.