Minister Gigaba’s jabs at Mayor Mashaba ill-considered

1 March 2017

It is deeply concerning that Home Affairs Minister, Malusi Gigaba, continues to jab at the DA-led Johannesburg Mayor, Herman Mashaba, in an attempt to deflect attention from the failures of the Department of Home Affairs on immigration.

The Minister’s ill-considered comments about the Mayor only seeks to divide the country on xenophobia and comes at a time when we should stand together and unite to protect all people.

Minister Gigaba is solely responsible for strictly ensuring the legal inflow of foreigners, as well as outflow of illegal immigrants from the country, and failures in this regard are on the shoulders of Gigaba, not any local government.

For more than five years now, the DA has been calling for an increase in the budget of the Immigration Services and yet Minister Gigaba has simply ignored this necessity. Today, Immigration Services are under-capacitated and cannot properly process all people coming into our country.

Mayor Mashaba has repeatedly requested urgent meetings with the Minister, but is being stood up as Minister Gigaba is too busy playing politics. The excuse from Gigaba’s office that he “can’t be meeting with Mayor Mashaba every two weeks” shows the flippancy of Gigaba’s approach to this critical situation.

Mayor Mashaba has repeatedly been quoted as saying that there is no place for xenophobia in Johannesburg, and that should be the one unified message.

In fact, the Joburg Mayor has put measures in place to ensure that communities are protected and that they have a direct help desk within the city.

The DA is calling on all South Africans not to take the law into their own hands and target foreign nationals, a problem which is exasperated by Minister Gigaba’s office which does absolutely nothing but play a blame-game.

There is an urgent need for Minister Gigaba to fix his office, deal with corruption which allows unqualified people to obtain South African identity documents, manage our porous borders and fast-track the process of permits for foreign nationals.

Issued by Khume Ramulifho, DA Johannesburg Regional Chairperson, 1 March 2017