Three weeks ago the Republic of Ireland’s justice minister, Helen McEntee, announced that South Africans and Batswana would be required to obtain a visa before travelling to her country. She said in recent years a significant number of international protection applications, known as refugee status applications in South Africa, have been received from nationals of Botswana and South Africa.
Now, South Africa is a country that attracts hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of foreign nationals who want to live here. That’s because it has a lot going for it: peace and stability, an open society and democracy, a measure of prosperity, the rule of law and great weather, among other things. It is not like Zimbabwe, a dictatorship whose citizens try to flee their country every day. So, why would there be a spike in refugees from South Africa to Ireland?
You would have expected the minister of home affairs, and indeed the entire government, to ask themselves some tough questions about this new measure. They were dead silent. They stayed quiet because they knew what the problem was: South African passports and other official documents are available to anyone prepared to pay for them. The people arriving in Ireland with South African documents and seeking refuge are not South Africans. They are people who have bought South African papers so they can travel to their desired destinations.
Let me be clear. These passports are not forgeries. They are real documents produced fraudulently at home affairs offices by home affairs officials. The scam has been going on for ages. In the mid-2000s, the US and the UK warned South Africa about the number of people being arrested in their countries with illegal South African documents.
It got so bad that the UK changed its open policy towards South African passport holders and demanded visas from them. Today, South Africans have to pay a hefty fee and jump through hoops to visit the UK and other countries. All because we would not lift a finger to stop the criminal gangs that operate out of our home affairs department.
This is a major security risk.
That’s why I paused the television, put my beer aside and had a right old chuckle at the weekend when I heard that police had arrested 95 Libyans in White River, Mpumalanga, at a suspected military training base. The Libyans were found housed in military tents with military training equipment, including licensed firearms. They also had some dagga and cocaine. They had legitimate student visas issued by South Africa.
If we cannot stop a 20-year run of rampant corruption at home affairs, how do we expect to stop threats against the state?
Now, listen to this: they had been in sunny Mpumalanga for three months, catching the rays and, I am sure, even popping into Kruger National Park for a bit of game viewing. In the entire three months, no-one at home affairs asked themselves what school it was in Mpumalanga that was so excellent that it attracted 95 Libyans in one fell swoop — and admitted them all.
Are we training mercenaries in South Africa? Are we training foreign militias, armies or insurrectionists? I don’t know. And neither does the state. Its department of home affairs does not know either. Nor does state intelligence.
This is all mildly funny, but it is actually tragic for one simple reason. If we cannot stop a 20-year run of rampant corruption at home affairs, despite being warned repeatedly about it back in the early 2000s, how do we expect to stop threats against the state? Who, pray tell, is in charge of our intelligence ministry, and what are they doing?
We are a country that knows the consequences of intelligence failures. The biggest intelligence failure in the history of South Africa was the July 2021 riots, which led to the deaths of 352 people and billions of rand of property damage. It happened because our intelligence services were asleep on the job.
The fact that a foreign army or militia was being trained in South Africa in broad daylight for three months without being noticed by anyone should lead to the firing of whoever is responsible. That won’t happen, though. We are a country that has nurtured mediocrity in its intelligence structures for more than 20 years (Lindiwe Sisulu, who was intelligence minister in the Mbeki administration, told us recently that she “bugged everyone”).
That’s why we don’t bat an eyelid when a foreign force trains and arms 95 combatants here.
Our security establishment is a joke. That’s no joke.
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