In one case, a woman was banned from the country even though she showed border management officials her VFS receipt for a visa extension.
Despite what Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi thinks he told the nation about visa renewals for tourists, the message does not appear to have sunk in with visitors – or border officials.
Motsoaledi said during the debate on the State of the Nation Address: “We are being accused of chasing tourists out of South Africa. Fortunately, I have had an opportunity to have a heart-to-heart discussion with my colleague in tourism, Minister de Lille.” Kendall copied his note to numerous Home Affairs officials and VFS staff, but there was no response. He called associated numbers that were never answered. Kendall also visited the Randburg Home Affairs office, which was unable to advise.
By 11 December, the extension had still not been granted, so when she left SA to attend to a family emergency, she was declared undesirable at the border and banned for five years.contacted Motsoaledi’s office to request an official statement to bring certainty. However, his spokesperson, Thabo Mokgola, insisted that what Motsoaledi had told Parliament during the Sona debate was sufficient.When pressed further, he repeated: “The matter is being addressed in the speech.
Frost says Home Affairs’ approach to the visa issue is “absolute incompetence of the most pernicious kind” because if the ministry cared about tourists and the impact of the fiasco, he would have responded to the issue immediately after it had first been reported. “In 2013, we reached our limit of 150,000 arrivals from China. The Aussies were at 700,000. What happened in the next six years is that the Aussies doubled their arrivals from China to 1.4 million. We go backwards to 95,000, simply because Home Affairs can’t do their job.
“The national ministers of Home Affairs and Tourism must ensure that the confusion and harm done by the ‘directive’ are urgently cleared up before any more economic and job-killing damage is done.”