Speaking at a New Age/SABC business briefing, Dlamini Zuma said there were loopholes in South Africa’s immigration and refugee laws. It’s just amazing it took her so long to come to this conclusion.
She also – only now – claims the loopholes are leading to abuse of the system. All of this is said in 2012 when – in 2007 already South Africa had more asylum seekers than all the 27 European Union countries combined. Now she says only 5% of those asylum seekers actually qualified for asylum.
She said the department was now developing new systems to minimise the potential security risks largely encouraged by an apparent lack of coordination between different Home Affairs units. “We just do not speak to each other and then you find out that people are taking advantage of these loopholes. “For instance, you find that someone comes into South Africa and a week later he or she is getting married and a month later they register as late registration of birth and we are unable to pick that up because our systems don’t talk to each other, so we want to change that,” said Dlamini Zuma.
The UK’s May can offer her many tips. May suggested last year that an illegal immigrant in the UK could not be thrown out of the country because he was worried about who would be looking after his pet cat. Can you imagine South Africa’s illegals all suddenly getting cats!
However, she acknowledged that the department faced a challenge of capacity with officials being overwhelmed by the number of applicants who apply for “several documentation” – not to mention the cats.
