Home Affairs faces 50 new lawsuits every week

Source: IOL, 27/06/2017

Johannesburg - The Home Affairs Department is being slapped with about
50 cases of litigation on a weekly basis, deputy director-general for
institutional planning and support Thulani Mavuso said.


Now the department is hiring legally qualified people who will be
placed in the directorates of immigration affairs and civic services
to monitor and act quickly on litigation-related issues.


“On a weekly basis we have to respond and instruct state attorneys to
defend matters. Some of them are opportunistic litigations,” Mavuso
said.


He made the comments after department offices in Mbombela, Mpumalanga,
were closed when the sheriff of the court attached its goods last
month.


This was after a foreign national took the department to court for
wrongful arrest and was granted a default judgment of R150 000, which
the department is now seeking to rescind.


It has been reported in the past how the department wasted millions in
taxpayers’ money on court battles.


The department had revealed in a parliamentary reply that it spent
R46.3 million on legal costs in 2011/2012, and R21.3m was spent in the
previous financial year.


In 2014, out of 404 judgments that were granted by the courts, 385
were made against the detentions of illegal foreigners at the Lindela
Repatriation Centre in Krugersdorp or failed asylum seekers who filed
judicial reviews against such rejections.


Mavuso said there were instances where people fly into OR Tambo
International Airport, only to be met by lawyers, ready to take the
department to court.


“It is quite bad in a sense that those opportunistic litigations,
actually in the area of immigration, are quite huge,” Mavuso
said.


“The same applies when people are arrested for fraudulent documents or
documents that are invalid and then taken to Lindela,” he added.
“You have lawyers who make Lindela a hunting ground for those cases,”
he said.


Mavuso also said the high volume of litigation was creating huge
administrative issues in the department.


“People use the law to say these are their constitutional rights and
we need to defend the cases. Sometimes we defend things which are
actually a waste of money.”


Deputy director-general for civic services Vusumuzi Mkhize said the
capacity of the department was being strengthened.
“We recently created posts for the core business in immigration and
civic to have a legal person to deal with any matter relating to
ligation,” Mkhize said.


When the department presented its budget to Parliament earlier this
year, it noted the lack of capacity in its legal services, risk
management, information services, financial management and counter
corruption and security services.


Its 2017/18 annual performance plan said there was a phased
restructuring of staff according to a plan proposed by a consulting
firm to increase the proportion of specialists and prioritise
posts.


Political Bureau