R341m to move people out, R122m to hold them: how Home Affairs spends your money on removals
Leon Schreiber told Parliament that 37 942 people were detained and deported between January and August, and that the bill for moving them ran from buses to chartered flights.
Home Affairs spent R341 million on repatriations between June and August 2026, and R122 million on detaining undocumented immigrants between January and May, according to a written reply from Minister Leon Schreiber to Parliament. As IOL reported on 28 October, the figures came in response to questions from MK Party MP Siyabonga Mkhize.
For a reader trying to work out how removal actually functions, the reply is closest thing to a cost sheet the department has put on the record. It separates the money spent holding people from the money spent moving them, and it names the contractors and the metros that carried the load.
The biggest single line is R232 million in buses hired from regional and long-distance coach operator Atlantic Charter & Tours. Another R8.7 million went on chartered flights by Cobra Aviation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Burundi. Setting up and running the Musina Temporary Repatriation Processing Centre cost R48 million. Departmental accommodation in Durban and Musina came to R9.5 million, and R14.5 million covered subsistence and travel allowances, venues and photocopy paper.
The department also reimbursed two metros for moving people to the border. eThekwini was paid R10.6 million for transporting undocumented immigrants from Durban to Musina, and the City of Cape Town R3.8 million for transport and for facilities erected at Epping. Those two reimbursements together come to more than R13 million, and they sit inside the R341 million repatriation figure.
Schreiber told Parliament that the department has not yet received a claim from the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure for establishing and maintaining the Musina centre, so that figure is not final.
On who was removed, the reply gives a total of 37 942 foreign nationals detained and deported by Home Affairs between 1 January and 31 August 2026. By country, that is 12 407 Zimbabweans, 10 725 Malawians, 9 548 Mozambicans and 4 435 Basotho. Schreiber said the figure excludes the vast numbers of people processed for repatriation.
The minister drew a line between his department’s role and the police’s. Arrests of foreign nationals are made by both the South African Police Service and Home Affairs, he said, and the people concerned were either sentenced or confirmed for detention and deportation after a judicial process. “The Department of Home Affairs can only account for the number of undocumented foreign nationals detained and deported, and not arrests that were conducted by other law enforcement agencies,” he said.
That distinction matters to anyone reading the numbers as an enforcement scorecard. The 37 942 is a count of people the department itself moved through detention and removal, not a count of everyone arrested under the immigration and related laws in the same period. The reply does not give the SAPS arrest total, so the two figures cannot be added together.
On who pays, Schreiber was direct. The costs of repatriation are borne by the South African government. His department does engage other countries to help identify, document and return their nationals, but, he said, “such cooperation does not necessarily provide for the reimbursement of the repatriation expenditure.”
In plain terms, the bus, the flight, the detention bed and the processing centre at Musina are South African costs. A receiving government’s willingness to take its nationals back does not come with an invoice to Treasury.
What a reader cannot take from the reply is a per-person cost. The R341 million covers a three-month window of repatriation, the R122 million a five-month window of detention, and the department has not published a breakdown that would let anyone divide one by the other. Nor does the reply say how many of the 37 942 were moved by bus, by charter flight or by road to Musina, or how long each person was held before removal.
What it does establish is the shape of the operation: a processing point at Musina, coach and charter contracts doing the long-distance work, two metros paid to get people to the border, and a department that says it can account for the people it deported but not for the arrests other agencies make.
