How Home Affairs wants to register asylum seekers online, and why the queue moved off the pavement
A court order forced the department to change how it processes asylum applications, the physical directive was pulled after protests, and the replacement is a booking system that March and March says it will fight on the same screen.
Home Affairs is moving asylum registration online. The Inter-Ministerial Committee on Migration (IMC) says the system should be ready by 10 November. For an applicant, that means an online booking before an in-person appointment, rather than joining a physical queue.
The change did not begin as a policy preference. It began as a court order. The Constitutional Court found certain sections of the Immigration Act unconstitutional, and Home Affairs issued a directive on processing asylum applications to give effect to that judgment. That directive was withdrawn after protests in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, which included cars being torched and businesses looted and set alight in the Durban CBD.
That is the sequence a reader needs to hold on to. The directive is gone. The court order is not. The online system is the department’s attempt to answer both.
As IOL reported on 13 October, March and March has said it will intensify its campaign online if the registration moves online. The movement argues the online route is worse than the physical one, on the reasoning that an application made remotely is an application made without a border in the way. Its spokesperson, Dube, put the arithmetic plainly: if Home Affairs rejects 95% of applications, 5% still get through, so one million applications would mean 50,000 approvals. He described the shift as a systematic replacement of South Africans by foreign nationals with the assistance of the South African government, and said the movement would not accept it after 21 months of marching.
That argument is the political fight now. What follows is how the machinery actually works.
What the court ordered, and what it did not
The Constitutional Court found specific sections of the Immigration Act unconstitutional. That is a finding about the law, not a finding about any individual applicant. It does not grant refugee status to anyone. It does not legalise anyone who is in the country unlawfully. It requires the state to process asylum applications in a way that complies with the Constitution, and the department’s directive was its first attempt at doing so.
When the directive was withdrawn, the obligation did not disappear with it. The IMC said this week that it is exploring an appropriate response to implementing the court’s order, and that it may ask the court for a supervisory order. A supervisory order would let the department implement the judgment under the court’s supervision, in an orderly way, while it builds the capacity it says it needs. That request, if it is made, is the next formal step. No date for it appears in the material available.
What the online system does
IMC chairperson Mamokolo Kubayi said the platform will let applicants make bookings before attending appointments in person. Officials would capture applicants’ data at that appointment, and the department expects turnaround times to improve. Kubayi said government would improve its communication so that people understand what they need to do, amid what she described as concerns and mistrust fuelled by misinformation.
That is the mechanism in one line: book online, appear in person, be captured. It is not a system that decides applications remotely, on the account the government has given. Whether the booking layer survives contact with the volume of applicants, and whether the appointments it generates can be honoured at the offices that exist, is the operational question the 10 November date will answer.
What a person at the counter faces
Under the withdrawn directive, the process was physical. Applicants queued at immigration centres. Those queues were the site of the protests that ended the directive. Under the replacement, the first step moves to a screen and the second step stays at a counter. Anyone who cannot reach the platform, or who books and cannot get an appointment, is in the same building as before with a different piece of paper.
Kubayi acknowledged that South Africans had raised legitimate concerns that some people were abusing the system, and said measures were needed to address that. She did not say in the material available what those measures are.
The numbers, and what they do not settle
The 95% rejection figure is the department’s own. On that figure, 5% of applications succeed. Dube’s projection of 50,000 approvals from one million applications follows arithmetically from the department’s own number. What the figure does not establish is how many people would apply under an online system, whether the volume would rise, fall or stay flat, or how many of the millions he refers to as already in the country unlawfully are counted, by whom, and on what basis. Those are the numbers South Africans are arguing about, and the ones neither side has put on the table in full.
What is settled and what is not
The court has found the law wanting. The department has a deadline of 10 November for a platform it says will fix the processing. March and March has said it will move its campaign online in response. The IMC has said it may ask the court to supervise the implementation. What no one has yet produced is the enforcement answer to the question the movement keeps asking: who may remain, who may be removed, and what the state can actually do about the people already here. Until that answer exists, the argument will keep moving between the pavement and the screen, and the queue will keep being the place where it is felt.
