A broken system, a cruel joke

Schreiber’s Tweet about processing 94% of applications also declared that “only mopping up and appeals” remained outstanding. This sounds great in theory, but there are currently fundamental problems with the appeals system. Schreiber knows about these problems, but he is hoping that no one else mentions them. 

Rejected visa applications tend to be appealed by people already living in South Africa They have lives, homes, and families that they are unable to leave at 10 days’ notice, so they put on a brave face, pay even more money, and run the Home Affairs gauntlet one more time to lodge their appeals (and then wait months praying that they don’t get rejected again). 

Everyone who appeals is required to submit their paperwork within 10 working days. This in turn requires that applicants can book appointments at the VFS offices where their appeals have to be formally lodged.  By late 2024 many more people were trying to appeal than the VFS system could handle within the statutory 10-day window. Schreiber was fully aware that this was happening because in late November, two weeks before his public Christmas party, he quietly issued a directive that relaxed the conditions under which people could submit their appeals. 

This directive is entitled “Temporary Concession Relating to Applications for Appeal or Review …” It is dated November 28, 2024, but it doesn’t appear to be listed on the DHA website (the link above goes to the website of a law firm based in Cape Town). And it most definitely hasn’t been Tweeted out by Schreiber or his crack PR team. On November 28, the Minister was instead Tweeting about technology as a “force multiplier.”

Schreiber’s directive on appeals notes that “It has come to the attention of the Department of Home Affairs (the “Department”) that appellants … have been experiencing problems with getting booking slots to submit their applications timeously.” Let me translate this into simpler English: people who were trying to appeal rejections were physically unable to lodge their appeals on time because there were no bookings available at VFS offices due to the massive volume of people who were trying to lodge their appeals. 

Schreiber’s solution to this problem, which he almost certainly created by prioritizing speed over everything else, has been to temporarily relax the 10-day window for appeals submission. Imagine being rejected incorrectly, and then frantically trying to find an available VFS slot to book a time to appeal and then finding nothing available within 10 days. Rejected visa applicants with immigration lawyers got the memo, since Schreiber’s directive was circulated behind the scenes, but applicants without lawyers were left in the dark. The Minister could have informed applicants that they could now submit their appeals until March 2025 as long as they paid for a booking, but he decided not to share this essential information publicly because this information would make him look bad. 

This is what is colloquially known as an asshole move. 

So here is the real story behind the visa backlog “success story.” Schreiber effectively broke the appeals system by overloading it with people who were indiscriminately rejected by Home Affairs. He wasn’t able to ramp up capacity to handle the higher volume of appeals that were coming from rejected visa applicants who were already based in South Africa (who wants to work extra with Christmas coming up?), so he instead decided to quietly punt his self-created appeals backlog to the New Year. People still had to pay for VFS bookings, but actual booking slots became so hard to get (unless you can bribe someone at VFS, so slots open up at short notice) that the actual process of lodging appeals got pushed back to January… or February… or even March 2025. Everyone involved in processing visas and appeals got to have their holidays without the hassle of having to think about all the traumatized people who had been rejected and were now scrambling to lodge appeals.

Surviving Home Affairs

I write this piece as a veteran of the Home Affairs application process over many years. This is why I am writing under the name of Josef K, the main character of Kafka’s famous book on bureaucracy as pathology. My Home Affairs ordeal may not be over, so I’d like to avoid being on their radar when/if applications for visas or other documentation come up in the future 

I’ve been incorrectly rejected by Home Affairs more than once. I know how the appeal system works because I’ve had to appeal. So, I also know just how stressful that 10-day appeal period can become. I have friends who have been rejected and have also appealed. We share notes about things that might help get visa applications over the line.. I’ve been asked if I want to join class action lawsuits to compel DHA to process visa applications that have been stuck in limbo for years. Lawyers make a fortune off Home Affairs, yet they earn their money by battling insanity every day. I know of cases where parents have applied for visas for their young children, and one child has been given a visa while another child, with exactly the same circumstances, has been rejected. 

This is why the trial of Josef K comes to mind. Josef runs afoul of the state for unspecified reasons and increasingly struggles under the weight of the insane and unknowable procedures associated with his case (before finally being executed, but I’d prefer not to dwell on that). Josef’s trial speaks to the pathologies of DHA and its private VFS partner. I know what it feels like to wait month after month wondering if my application has finally been processed, and then the strain that follows when news finally comes that your outcome is ready. Every step in this process is traumatic. I’ve sat in lines at VFS offices waiting for my number to be called, watching as people ahead in the line discover their fate. There is a sealed envelope that contains either a visa or a rejection letter, and you don’t know which until it gets opened. VFS offices are places of acute sadness and stress. Everyone who is waiting in line to learn their fate knows that the process can be a crapshoot. Home Affairs doesn’t correctly or consistently apply its legal regulations, so there is always a chance that your application might be rejected no matter how strong your case might be.

I’ve had to appeal rejections several times, and on every occasion, my appeal has included using a yellow highlighter to draw attention to key passages within applicable legislation and hoping that the official who gets my appeal will read and apply the relevant legal criteria. An appeal to Home Affairs does not involve worrying that you don’t meet their criteria, but instead worrying that the person looking at the appeal doesn’t understand the criteria. So far, all of my appeals have been successful, but they are also hugely frustrating and traumatic. 

The Minister is well aware that visa applications are a massive problem. He has been making speech after speech about visas since he took up his portfolio in June 2024. In September 2024 he issued a press release which was entitled “Home Affairs delivers on GNU mandate with cutting-edge visa reform to combat corruption and create jobs” (you can definitely find this one on the DHA website). This press release cited research from the Reserve Bank and the International Food Policy Research that found that “an enhanced Visa regime can create seven new jobs for every additional skilled worker attracted into the economy.” Nearly any economist will tell you that skilled migration is a net positive for the receiving country, so this isn’t exactly new information, yet the Minister has also gravely underestimated the scale of the bureaucratic challenge he is facing. You are not going to attract skilled migrants if Home Affairs officials keep hitting the reject button over and over again for no good reason. 

The top management of DHA may have changed, but the vast majority of staff have not. These are people who cut their teeth in a department marked by cruelty, corruption, impunity, and incompetence. Schreiber naively tasked his staff with the speedy resolution of the backlog, and they quite predictably responded to his instruction by rejecting people wholesale. The Minister could have come clean and publicly tried to resolve this mess, but he has stuck his fingers in his ears pretending it doesn’t exist. 

We are all in this together

None of these issues with Home Affairs are new. People living in South Africa don’t agree on much these days, but pretty much everyone agrees that DHA has been a catastrophic mess for years. Their systems are antiques come to life, and they routinely break down. Indifference and incompetence are so common that people report the rare occasions when things worked out as they were supposed to as landmark events (gather ‘round dear friends for the fantastical story of how getting a birth certificate for my newborn baby was fast and straightforward). Spending four to five hours in line at a DHA office and finally getting what you came for is a victory against the odds. For many years the South African news platform Daily Maverick has organized their DHA reporting under the heading “Hell Affairs.”

If Home Affairs staff are rejecting visa applicants wholesale without following legal criteria then there need to be consequences for getting things wrong. The most depressing feature of Home Affairs is the near-total lack of accountability when things go wrong… and wrong … and wrong yet again. And this isn’t just visas. For years now DHA has been wilfully ignoring court orders. In 2023 it emerged that “More than a quarter of a million children under the age of 15 are undocumented in South Africa as the Department of Home Affairs has yet to issue them with birth certificates.”

Everyone living in or visiting South Africa needs Home Affairs to work as it is supposed to. This is one thing that should bring us all together irrespective of other differences. Fixing visa applications requires competent staff and professional and accountable systems. Fixing the system for issuing birth certificates requires the same thing. Having administrative systems that don’t constantly break down benefits everyone who is applying for essential documentation; visas and passports, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses etc. Having sufficient administrative capacity and systems to actually process applications both quickly and fairly would be worth throwing a party over. 

Bullshiting on Twitter about “fixing” the Home Affairs backlog is not going to cut it. 

Racism, rejection and the limits of solidarity

South Africans attempting to work, travel, or study overseas routinely face horrendous bureaucratic challenges which once again bring Josef K’s trials to mind. A South African citizen seeking to travel to Canada as a short-term visitor can expect to wait 326 days for their visa to be processed (while Canadians can visit South Africa with no visa requirement). And many countries in the North are just as good as Home Affairs at rejecting applicants wholesale. South Africans can spend thousands on flight bookings, and more on visa applications, and get rejected. In 2018 it was reported that the Canadian government had rejected a staggering 600,000 visa applications, and there is ample evidence to suggest that things have gotten worse and not better in recent years. 

This isn’t just South Africa, but the African continent as a whole. In one famous example from 2017, an annual African trade summit held in Los Angeles featured no African delegates since at least 60 delegates from the continent had been denied visas. A 2019 Royal Society report on African visa applications to the United Kingdom calculated that the UK rejects visa applications from Africans at twice their global average, with racist algorithms determining that it is “too risky” for many African applicants to travel to the UK for even short trips. The Royal Society report found that the UK Home Office was behaving in very similar ways to the South African Department of Home Affairs, with African applicants to the UK experiencing “irrational decisions that overlooked some of the information provided with a visa application, divergent decisions taken in effectively identical cases, and different decisions taken when an identical re-application was made.”

So wholesale visa rejections are not a uniquely South African problem, but a global condition. This has come to be increasingly described as “visa apartheid,” with African citizens being subject to especially onerous conditions for the usual racist reasons.

In December 2024, the journal Nature published an article by Gilbert Nakweya on “how visa rejections are stalling Africa’s health research.” This piece included numerous examples of African scientists who couldn’t attend conferences in Canada and Germany “due to visa delays and denials”. One Kenyan medical expert, Marie-Claire Wangari, recounted how she and other colleagues had been repeatedly rejected for meetings in Montenegro and Finland. 

There is absolutely no doubt that these rejections are fundamentally unjust. However, this is not the end of the article. As Nakweya goes on to observe “While visa denials for Africans are common in the Global North, they also happen in Africa.” 

Visas for Nigerians were recently a major source of political controversy in South Africa. In early December 2024, there was yet another call for a #NationalShutdown targeting President Cyril Ramphosa, who was falsely accused of “opening the borders” to Nigerians by Operation Dudula, their xenophobic fellow travelers, and “Guptabots.” These allegations were easily debunked, since they had their origins in minor technical changes in how Nigerian visas were being processed, but they are still emblematic of the current state of politics in South Africa, which a xenophobic race to the bottom has marked. 

Migrants and travelers are routinely divided into “good” and “bad” categories. “Good” migrants are said to follow the rules, which usually include applying through the “front door” for visas. The figure of the “good” migrant is frequently used as a cudgel to attack “bad” migrants, who are negatively defined as deviant and threatening rule-breakers. However, the recent history of racism and xenophobia has demonstrated that having a valid visa does not provide protection against exclusion and violence. When President Donald Trump made his infamous remarks about how Haitians were “eating the dogs,” it didn’t matter that the Haitians in question had valid visas to work in Ohio. In theory, they should have been treated as “good” migrants who followed the rules, but the racist and xenophobic tide is now so strong that many Americans have lost patience with these kinds of legal distinctions. Adherents to racist conspiracy theories regarding the “Great Replacement” do not care whether non-white migrant “invaders” have traveled either legally or illegally.

This is equally true of South Africans. People who want to #PutSouthAfricaFirst are not going to be upset that Home Affairs has been rejecting visa applications indiscriminately. They will instead treat this as yet another opportunity to register their distress that even more “Kwere Kwere” haven’t been rejected, dehumanized, deported or even destroyed. In recent months the South African government oversaw the horrifying and avoidable deaths of informal miners at Stilfontein, yet most South Africans remain indifferent to the bonds of solidarity, particularly in cases where undocumented African migrants are involved. 

The fight for a just system

On January 15 this year, Minister Schreiber was yet again celebrating on Twitter. This time he was trumpeting his apparent contribution to the improved ranking of South Africa on the Henley “Passport Power” Index, where he proudly announced that the “Green Mamba has broken into the top 50 for the first time in a decade, improving from 53rd in the world in 2024 to 48th in 2025.” Unlike the ongoing problems with the appeals system and VFS bookings, this news was also deemed important enough for an official media statement. 

Passport power attempts to calculate how easy it is for passport holders to travel internationally. This minor jump in a private corporate index doesn’t feel particularly noteworthy, but it is still worth briefly reflecting upon the underlying logic beyond “passport power”. Crucially, the “power” of the South African passport is not dependent on how the South African government treats people seeking to enter its territory but is instead a much more limited measure of how easily South Africans can travel to other countries. 

I’d like to think that passport fairness is a much more attractive measure than passport power. Shifting the focus to fairness means thinking about both 1) whether the restrictions imposed upon people seeking to travel are just and reasonable, and 2) whether the criteria used to assess visa applications have been correctly and consistently applied. 

Getting visa applications processed quickly is undoubtedly useful, but the most important measure of any migration system should be whether or not it deals with applicants fairly. This isn’t going to be easy, but it is the only way to build back in solidarity.