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House Chair

This budget does not demonstrate how it plans to improve the service at the Department of Home Affairs, the department’s performance keeps deteriorating and the citizens of this country are the ones who are being failed, a number of issues have been raised yet to date they remain unresolved:

The issue of long queues in different parts of country and by various members of our Portfolio Committee, has been raised on numerous occasions yet the situation remains the same. Citizens of this country spend days and weeks at the queues without being attended to and lose days of work because the Department has not introduced the appointment system.

Around February 2021, we were advised by the Minister that the department has deployed EPWP workers to Eastern Cape who were going to be trained on the Home Affairs system to assist in the fight against long queues and to date we have not received progress report to ascertain whether that intervention was successful, and when it is going to be rolled out to other Provinces to ensure members of the community get the service they deserve timeously.

To mention a few, Cllr Mariette Preddy has registered a number of complaints, advising that officials are failing to deal with the long Queues and Nkomazi Home Affairs offices in Mpumalanga, and that there is no queue marshal who’s ensuring that members of the community were maintaining social distancing as per the Covid-19 regulations.

We have also conducted an oversight at Benoni Home Affairs offices in Gauteng where an issue of long queues was raised by Cllr. Sinethemba Matiwane. The DA reiteratesthe call for Home Affairs to introduce an appointment system to make the lives of the citizens of South Africa easier.While we await the implementation of Border Management Act the budget is mum on an immediate plan to deal with our porous borders. In November 2020, Mr. Bushiri and his wife Mary escaped to Malawi without anyone being able to detect how they left South Africa.

The DA called on the Minister to account;he appeared before the Portfolio Committee and advised us that he doesn’t know how this couple left our countryand further advised that he will meet with other departments involved and provide feedback, and to this day there has been no report from the Minister.

The Minister is failing the citizens of this country.In January 2021 people and trucks travelling in and out of the country using the Beitbridge and Lebombo Ports of Entry were not attended to, travelers spent weeks at the border gate because of the Department’s incompetency. It was only after the DA called on the Minister to intervene and after the Portfolio Committee conducted an oversight that we saw progress.

We also went to Mbuzini and made a shocking discovery, there is ONLY a fence that separate South Africa from the Swaziland–I have a picture as evidence.We also saw people who were crossing atthat fence and being transported by taxis into South Africa. We need an urgent plan to address the issue of our porous borders.

The DA will improve border management and control by:

•Reviewing the number and size of border posts and their management to increase the number of points of legal entry and exit. The increased number of border posts with heightened policing will also serve to prevent criminal activity, illicit trade, poaching and stock theft, and enable and improve the efficiency of ongoing inter-border and transregional trade and investment to build businesses and create jobs.

•Ensuring effective, efficient,and coordinated border security and border control through increased policing capacity at our border posts and along our borders.

•Increasing the 15 SANDF companies protecting South Africa’s borders to the required 22 companiesand ensuringthat they are properly resourced and trained.

•Making use of crime intelligence and combatting all forms of crime and corruption, irrespective of whether it is committed by foreign nationals or South Africans, to prevent bribery and corruption by Home Affairs, SAPS and SARS officials or staff.

•Decisively dealing with the poor border management and weak implementation of migration policy through the use of research and data from a well-capacitated Stats SA.

In August 2020 during the Budget vote debate the Minister stood on the podium and told the house that I had been sued by the Government Printing Works (GPW) Acting CEO after allegations that she was not qualified for the CEO job she was shortlisted and interviewed for, following a statement the DA issued calling for the CEO to be suspended pending the outcome of the investigation on a number of allegations levelled against her.

Today in his response, the Minister must tell us why he re-advertise the GPW CEO Post in September 2020 and changed the requirements to seemingly suit Ms. Fosi.Today, I speak on behalf of every woman that we do not want to be reduced to gender, we want to be appointed on merits. Albert Einsteinsaid:

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”House Chair, the DA will always ensure that it holds the Executive accountable and fight for the rights of our voters, there is no amount of intimidation that will stop us from conducting our oversight role.Minister Motsoaledi must step down before he leaves this Department in same state he left the Health Department.

Thank you.