The Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) has taken legal action to challenge decision of Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi to terminate the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP).

The policy was adopted in 2009 by then-Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as a temporary solution to a growing refugee crisis related to Zimbabwe.

Motsoaledi announced in November 2021 that the programme would be terminated, which HSF says did not follow proper public consultation processes.

Further, HSF points out that ZEP holders must obtain other forms of residency authorisation by December 31, 2022 or leave South Africa.

HSF CEO Nicole Fritz said the ZEP has offered legal protection to about 178 000 Zimbabwean nationals, allowing them to live, work and study in South Africa.

“It has prevailed for well over a decade, meaning that permit-holders have built lives, families and careers here and contributed to South Africa and its economy,” she said.

She explained that HSF did not take the position that illegal migrants should be entitled to remain, nor even that the ZEP must continue in perpetuity.

“Rather, our position is that those who have scrupulously observed South Africa’s laws in order to live and work here under the ZEP cannot have such permits terminated without fair process, good reason and a meaningful opportunity to regularise their status,” she said.

She pointed out that there were thousands of children who have been born in South Africa to ZEP holders during this time who have never even visited their parents’ country of origin.

“[Parents] will be put to a desperate choice: to remain in South Africa as undocumented migrants with all the vulnerability that attaches to such status or return to a Zimbabwe that, to all intents and purposes, is unchanged from the country they fled,” she said.