Government must act ahead of 30 June mob deadline and assert rule of law

In a little over two weeks, a date looms over South Africa that no court has ordered, no statute has sanctioned, and no organ of state has endorsed. It was conjured by a private movement with no legal authority whatsoever. Yet the fear it has generated is entirely real.

The June 30 deadline issued by a private movement demanding that undocumented foreign nationals leave South Africa has no legal force whatsoever. Not one person, not one organisation outside of the state has the authority to instruct any individual to leave this country. The police have said so. The courts have consistently affirmed it. The Constitution is unambiguous. Enforcement of immigration law is the exclusive function of the state and the state alone.

Yet hundreds of foreign nationals are sleeping outside Home Affairs offices. Governments in Nigeria, Mozambique, Malawi, Ghana and Zimbabwe are repatriating their citizens. South African law does require those who are in the country unlawfully to depart. But that is not who is fleeing.

Many, perhaps most of those now leaving or queuing in fear, are people with valid documentation, people with pending applications whose status has simply not yet been decided, people who have built lives, raised children, paid taxes and contributed to this country. They are fleeing not a court order, but a climate of fear stoked by misinformation and, in some cases, by men carrying sjamboks and golf clubs. This is not immigration enforcement. This is a constitutional crisis.

South Africa’s Constitution guarantees the right to dignity, equality and freedom from violence for every person within its borders, citizen and non-citizen alike. The Immigration Act sets out precisely how enforcement must occur: through authorised officials, following due process, with the right to legal representation and the right to challenge decisions before a court.

None of that process involves a march. None of it involves a deadline announced on social media. None of it involves confronting people in the street to demand proof of nationality, conduct that the police correctly characterised as unlawful intimidation.

Those who are here legally have every right to remain. Those whose applications are pending cannot simply be told to leave; they are inside a legal process that the Department of Home Affairs itself has not yet concluded, and many have been inside that process for years, waiting on decisions that should, by the department’s own service standards, take a matter of months. They are waiting not because of anything they did wrong, but because the system is backlogged. Blanket concessions have been extended repeatedly precisely because the state cannot process applications within its own timeframes.

Abandonment of law

To now suggest that those same people must leave by a date invented by a private group before their applications are decided, before due process has run its course, is not law enforcement. It is the abandonment of law.

Behind every pending application is a person. A family. A child whose schooling is disrupted. A professional who cannot travel. A business owner who cannot plan. A spouse separated from loved ones.

But let us be honest about something else, too: foreign nationals are not the only ones who are afraid. South Africans are afraid. Afraid of unemployment that has hollowed out their communities. Afraid of clinics and schools stretched past breaking point. Afraid of crime, of corruption, of a state that too often does not deliver. Those fears are real, they are legitimate, and they deserve to be heard, not dismissed and never sneered at.

The Constitution protects the right of South Africans to protest, to march, to demand better from their government. That right is precious. It was paid for in blood. Nothing in this article, nothing, should be read as questioning it.

But that is precisely why what is happening now is such a betrayal of those legitimate grievances. A movement that began by pointing at real problems has shifted the nation’s focus away from them, away from the broken systems, the corruption, the failures of delivery and onto an unlawful ultimatum directed at human beings.

Demanding that the government fix immigration enforcement is protest. Setting a private deadline, marching with sjamboks, confronting people in the street and instructing businesses to fire their workers is not protest. It is intimidation. In some instances, it is extortion. And inciting public violence is a crime in this country, today, not on 30 June.

Why wait?

Which raises the question the government has not yet answered: why wait? The crimes being committed in the name of this deadline are being committed now. The law does not require the state to hold its breath until a mob’s calendar runs out.

The President’s recent address to the nation deserves recognition. He said what needed to be said: that enforcement of immigration law belongs to the state and the state alone; that no person may confront another in the street to demand proof of nationality; that South Africans’ concerns are real and will be acted upon; that groups exploiting those concerns to incite lawlessness will be dealt with. The commitments are the right foundations, and we should support them.

We salute the message. But the timing told its own story.

These words should have been spoken long ago when the backlogs first became a crisis, when the first marches turned menacing, when the first families began to flee. Instead, the head of state addressed the nation three weeks before a deadline invented by a private movement. However unintended, the sequence risks being read as validation: make a threat loud enough and the President will respond to your schedule. A constitutional democracy cannot afford even the perception that it governs by the calendar of those who march with weapons.

And the marchers heard it that way. They have rejected the intervention. They continue. The deadline stands, in their minds, unmoved.

When the state hesitates to draw a bright line between lawful protest and unlawful intimidation, the line blurs for everyone. Citizens with genuine grievances are lumped together with those carrying golf clubs. People with valid permits are lumped together with the undocumented. The distinction between legal and illegal, the very distinction the law exists to draw, is erased in the streets, by whoever shouts loudest.

What message does that send? To the woman with a valid spousal visa, it says her papers may not protect her. To the employer, it says compliance with the law may not be enough. To the police officer on the ground, it says the rules of engagement are unclear, and to the world, it says something graver still.

Five governments — Nigeria, Mozambique, Malawi, Ghana, Zimbabwe — are now repatriating their citizens from South Africa. Sit with that for a moment. Our neighbours, our trading partners, the countries that sheltered South Africans during the darkest years of our history, are evacuating their people from us. Whatever the eventual cost in trade, in diplomacy, in our standing on this continent we claim to lead, the moral cost has already been incurred. That is not who we said we would be.

Action is needed

Good intentions and policy frameworks are not enough. What is needed now is visible, consistent, lawful action.

First, the law must be enforced today. Every act of intimidation, incitement, assault or extortion committed in the name of this deadline must be investigated and prosecuted now, not after 30 June and not only if violence erupts. Waiting is itself a message.

Second, people must be told they are safe. Home Affairs must say clearly, publicly, in languages people understand: if you hold a valid permit, a pending application or an approved concession, you are here lawfully, you have rights, and no private deadline changes that.

Third, employers must be protected. Those who pressure businesses to dismiss lawfully employed staff are committing an offence. Enforce it.

Fourth, the line must be drawn out loud. Government must say, in terms no one can mistake: 30 June is not a date known to South African law; it will not be treated as one, and those who weaponise it will answer for it.

And through all of it, the narrative must be corrected at the highest levels, consistently. Foreign nationals did not create South Africa’s unemployment, its backlogs or its corruption. South Africans deserve real answers to real problems, and scapegoating the man who fixes cars in Soweto or the nurse from Harare is not an answer. It is a theft of the country’s attention from the reforms that would actually change lives.

South Africa has been here before. We know where the road of exclusion and intimidation leads, because we walked it and we swore, in the first line of our Constitution, never to walk it again.

The rule of law is not a slogan, and it is not a lawyer’s luxury. It is the only thing standing between every one of us, citizen and non-citizen alike and the rule of whoever is strongest on the day. When it is eroded for the most vulnerable, it is eroded for all. The South African worried about her job and the Malawian worried about his family are not enemies. They are both being failed by the same broken system, and both are owed the same thing: a state that works and a law that protects.

The government has the framework. It has the institutions. It has, as of Sunday, the words. What it needs now is the courage to act on them equally, visibly and without waiting for a date that has no right to exist.

The 30th of June is not a legal date. It must not be treated as one. And the people living in its shadow, all of them, should not have to spend the next coming days afraid. DM