Closed skies, delayed visas — Home Affairs must confront reality now

As conflict in the Middle East intensifies and key airspace closures disrupt ordinary travel routes, global uncertainty is mounting.

While the geopolitical crisis itself lies beyond South Africa’s control, some of its domestic consequences do not. Some can, and should be, managed proactively, rationally and in time, before they place unnecessary strain on an immigration system that Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber is trying to recalibrate.

Already over the past few days, many travellers have found themselves unable to board flights, including from South Africa. As flights are cancelled, connections collapse, routes narrow and travellers are either stranded or placed on waiting lists for re-routing to their final destinations.

Public reporting in recent days has described tens of thousands of people stranded across the Gulf, with some 8,000 transit passengers reportedly marooned in Qatar alone, while around 4,000 flights had been expected into the region on one of the main days of disruption. UAE authorities have also reportedly said that more than 20,000 travellers required assistance in a single weekend.

The Gulf — a principal SA connecting bridge

For South Africa, the disruption can quickly become acute as the Gulf is not a peripheral corridor. It is one of the country’s principal connecting bridges to Europe, Asia and beyond. Publicly available airline schedules show how heavily South Africa feeds those hubs.

Emirates’ South Africa network accounts for roughly 42 weekly flights on the Dubai corridor through Johannesburg and Cape Town. Qatar Airways’ published South Africa schedule adds a further 35 weekly frequencies through Johannesburg, Cape Town and the Durban-linked routing. Etihad’s Johannesburg-Abu Dhabi service adds another daily connection.

On any conservative reading, that is roughly 90 weekly scheduled links from South Africa into the Gulf hub system.

This global dependence is reflected in the scale of the hubs themselves: Dubai International has reported 95.2 million passengers for 2025, which works out to roughly 7.9 million passengers a month on average, while Abu Dhabi Airports has reported 29.4 million passengers for 2024 across its network, or roughly 2.45 million a month on average. Even on those headline figures alone, the scale of reliance on these Gulf hubs is unmistakable.

Unwanted overstays, therefore, become not only foreseeable, but in some cases, unavoidable. The real question is what the South African immigration system chooses to do with that reality.

Agile response

Will it respond in a manner aligned with lived events, or will it persist in applying standardised policy?

A visible tension between institutional narrative and operational truth was already exposed by Immigration Directive 22 of 2025, which excluded visa applicants from any concession on the claim that the visa backlog had been fully eradicated. That claim is far removed from the reality on the ground, where many long-term visa applications remain delayed, unresolved, and caught in precisely the kind of administrative limbo that made those protections necessary in the first place.

This is not a minor inconvenience that can be brushed aside as ordinary travel volatility, particularly if the conflict in the Middle East persists or widens. Emirates has suspended all scheduled flights to and from Dubai through the current closure window, and Qatar Airways has confirmed that its scheduled operations remain temporarily suspended because Qatari airspace remains closed. When the principal transit corridors themselves are shut, the legal consequences for travellers cannot be treated as though nothing material has changed.

Other states with significant tourism exposure have already recognised that when travel becomes impossible, immigration compliance must adapt to reality.

Thailand has announced emergency relief measures for foreign nationals unable to leave because of the Middle East airspace closures, including a waiver of overstay fines for those departing and the possibility of temporary stay extensions, with the measures applying to permissions that expired from 28 February 2026 onward.

The Maldives has likewise announced visa extensions for tourists stranded by war-related flight cancellations after acknowledging that some visitors may be unable to leave before their visas expire.

South Africa itself adopted the same logic during the Covid-19 state of disaster, when Home Affairs put in place temporary visa concessions for those unable to depart lawfully because of external disruption. The principle is therefore neither radical nor novel: where external events make compliance impossible, a rational state mitigates avoidable illegality rather than waiting for it to arise.

Stress test

The present travel crisis does not exist in a vacuum, it lands on top of an immigration system already navigating the after-effects of delay, inconsistency and premature declarations of efficiency.

The issue is larger than stranded travellers alone. Visa applicants who have been rejected and have submitted appeals are currently more protected than a visa applicant who has not been rejected. That is an absurdity, and it has already contributed to unnecessary declarations of undesirability, often through no real fault of the individual affected.

The current moment should be seen and addressed as a stress test of administrative maturity. The true measure of an immigration system is not only how it functions when conditions are stable, but whether it can react efficiently to change.

Schreiber and his department have an opportunity to react now and to show a genuinely proactive approach. If South Africa’s immigration administration is to be credible, it must be honest enough to confront events as they are, not as it wishes they were.

The present travel crisis carries the immediate risk of magnifying the same misalignment between official posture and lived reality that Directive 22 has already exposed. DM

Claudia Pizzocri is CEO at immigration and citizenship law firm Eisenberg & Associates.