EFF condemns the proposed Dompass-system by Aaron Motsoaledi which encourages SAPS to conduct spot-checks to determine whether people are ‘legal’ foreign nationals

23 September 2022

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) condemns the hateful proclamation by Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi, who has encouraged South African Police Services (SAPS) to conduct "spot checks" on foreign nationals to check whether they are in the country "legally".

Motsoaledi, who is the vilest proponent of anti-African xenophobia by government reportedly said this in the Home Affairs Portfolio Committee, making Parliament complicit to a dehumanising act reminiscent of the dark days of Apartheid.

Motsoaledi has in essence instituted a modern day dompass-system for African people, who will now have to carry around identity documents to prove that they are not in South Africa illegally. He makes this pronouncement without any consideration of the hate and abuse that African people will be subjected to and with no appreciation that racism will guide the implementation of his spot-checks.

What metric will SAPS use to conduct a random spot-check on the legality of African people? What behaviour or marker qualifies one to be a suspect of illegal foreign nationality, and therefore a subject for a random search? This xenophobic proposition will lead to the abuse and arrest of Africans in their numbers.

The tragedy of it all is that is it people with an African skin, who will be victims of these random searches, because it is the black skin that is associated with the so-called illegality of being foreign.

South Africans themselves will be detained for failing to produce South African identity documents, because there is no scientific measure of determining whether someone is a foreign national simply by looking at them.

Evidence of this was clear when Tshivenda and Xitsonga speaking South Africans were refused access to healthcare in Kalafong or were asked to pronounce certain body parts in different languages by the police in Diepsloot.

In its quest for votes, the ANC has not only sacrificed its consciousness, but logic and the basic foundations of common decency and humanity. Millions of African people are today vulnerable in the streets of South Africa because a black government will be asking us to prove that we belong on African soil.

Africans have once again become pariahs in the land of their birth, but it is not colonialists or Apartheid-legislation that has done this, but a democratic government whose decline has driven it to madness.

Our people must resist this draconian and inhumane proposition and if needs be flood the prisons of South Africa, rather than have our movement as Africans dependent on proving that our existence is legal in Africa.

No policeman has the right to ask an African person to produce proof that they are legal as a human being, and whether you are South African, Malawian, Zimbabwean or Haitian, no one must comply. If it is a crime to be African, then let us all be arrested.

Issued by Sinawo Thambo, National Spokesperson, EFF, 23 September 2022