Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni has suggested that South Africans are ungrateful for the work being done by the government.
Ntshavheni was part of an emergency media briefing by the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Immigration, during which she questioned criticism of the government as unreasonable.
The media engagement followed a wave of misinformation about the latest Constitutional Court ruling barring the government from deporting illegal immigrants before considering their applications for asylum. Many people, deliberately or otherwise, interpreted the ruling as granting blanket rights to foreign nationals who are in the country unlawfully, including the right to vote.
The minister said critics never acknowledge when the government gets things right. She believes there is a deliberate effort to delegitimise the government.
“We know that there is an attempt to make sure that there is no trust in government. And the problem is that when government has achieved and succeeded, we don’t come back and say, sorry, government, we undermined you, but you were very effective in dealing with this. We have been threatened left, right and centre; we said, go ahead, we are in charge.
“And when we have demonstrated that we have full control, you don’t come back and say, oh, thank you, we doubted it, we apologise,” said Ntshavheni.
She said sections of South African society unreasonably expected state institutions to provide blow-by-blow accounts of everything they do, which is humanly impossible.
“Who says we are not revoking? Should we bring the police to tell you the details of their investigations against X person or Y person or Z person? Or how are we going to prosecute? Imagine if the police come in and say we have arrested 20 people, we are investigating, this is the detail, this is the law that we are using, this is the legislation that we are using, this is the statute that we are using. Where are we going to go?” said the minister.
She also defended the government’s actions following the Constitutional Court judgment.
“You are saying the judgment was on 7 July, then what did we do with the three months? Why were we not doing? That’s why, in the statement, we indicated that we wrote to the DG of Home Affairs, to the Judge President of Gauteng, to say there are contradictions, and therefore we want to… And the Judge President of Gauteng responded and put a ban on it, and we are going to court by submitting our papers on the 27th or 28th of October. On 29 October, there is a court session, because we have been doing well.
“We didn’t announce it because we didn’t feel we had to announce it. We felt that we are doing well to see the work that is being done. We don’t have to announce every step of the work that we are doing. So we have not been sitting to twiddle our thumbs. We have been doing well,” she said.