The Home Affairs disaster cuts right across society, including the learner who needs an identity document to write matric exams, widows left stranded without death certificates to access pension funds or moms cradling newborns who need birth certificates for child care grants.

Or a spouse, of say, an entrepreneur or small-scale investor, left vulnerable not knowing if South Africa can be the family home and workplace given the lack of certainty on permanent residency. Or the business executive whose visa to South Africa falls into the investment drive President Cyril Ramaphosa has pursued to boost economic growth.

The presidential R1.2-trillion investment target is some 95% met with a year still to go. But people adroit with numbers point out the difference between pledges and actual rands in the government’s bank account. Those numbers reflect not much more than what would have come to South Africa anyway.

So what’s more important is what actually gets done – more cars, more vaccines, more chocolates. Or green hydrogen, and electric cars. And visas are key for that. One would have thought immigration permitting prioritisation in the interest of economic growth – and job creation – would be supported with a clear focus on business, critical skills and related visas.

Not so in this mess

“The new process requires printing of applications and routing them to the chief director [of] permits, a process which is cumbersome and results in undue delays,” says Home Affairs’ 2021/22 annual report on why the target of 90% in the eight weeks turnaround for business and general work visas evaporated from mid-January 2022.

On the critical skills visa front, just more than 57% of applications were adjudicated within the targeted four weeks. What happened to the other 2,086 applications, or how long they will remain outstanding, is not detailed. The report shows “negative per­formance” for the first quarter of 2022.

Global grumblings grew also from companies whose executives were stuck in visa limbo, never mind any investment or other commitment made in presidential ribbon-cutting moments.

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South Africa hosts hundreds of overseas companies, which have invested tens of billions of rands in the economy and social upliftment. Those include 600 German companies, 400 French, 100 Swiss, 150 British and about 600 American companies.

Why a new way of visa application processes would be introduced without having all required systems in place is gobsmacking. That it took to September 2022 – in effect seven months – to fix the growing backlog is similarly gobsmacking.

“The Department of Home Affairs has … held meetings with various stakeholders to update them on their applications such as Ford, SAB, BMW, Procter & Gamble and Huawei,” said Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi’s parliamentary reply to IFP MP Liezl van der Merwe in September.

A list of 605 such business visa applications have now been finalised since the establishment of a “dedicated team” of Home Affairs and Trade, Industry and Competition. An additional 26 adjudicators are prioritising critical skills and business visa applications to ensure a shorter turnaround time. This is as South African missions abroad are  again allowed to process applications since 1 September.

“The department will continue to contribute to provide support to government to realise economic growth while also ensuring the integrity of our enabling documents,” said Motsoaledi in his parliamentary reply 2917.

More business visas outstanding

In early October it’s understood two chambers of commerce representing various European companies finally managed to clinch a meeting with Home Affairs top officials. Whether the reassurances that backlogs are being addressed actually turn into visas in passports remains to be seen.

Crucially, the point is not to support elite facilitated services. It’s that if even those with access to top public service decision-makers are left floundering, what hope do ordinary South Africans have in accessing Home Affairs services?

In 2016, Home Affairs moved from the governance ministerial cluster to security. But securocrats are more focused on what the police calls “stamping the authority of the state”. Yet, ironically, one of South Africa’s biggest security risks is the absence of transparency and accountability – or one rule for everyone, every time – in the Home Affairs chaos. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.