Home Affairs has about 1.2 million asylum seekers on its system. and about 800,000 have stopped reporting to the department.
Only about 90,000 cases are active, while another 320,000 have been closed or finalised, according to figures presented to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs on Friday.
The department also listed about 113,000 refugees on its system. Of these, 60,000 are active cases and 53,000 are inactive.
Home Affairs official Mandla Madumisa said many of the inactive asylum cases date back years.
“These cases are historical. They come from the old system that was replaced in 2008. But also some of them post 2008, as they continue to abandon their asylum claims,” Madumisa said.
He said some asylum seekers had abandoned their claims, left South Africa or simply stopped visiting Home Affairs offices.
Madumisa said the department had tried to close inactive files as abandoned cases under amendments to the Refugees Act introduced in 2017.
“Those provisions were also contested and the outcome did not go our way,” he said.
The inactive cases continue to distort the department’s statistics.
“Even between ourselves and the appellants, there is an understanding that the inactive cases tend to negatively affect our statistics,” Madumisa said.
However, the department could not say how many of the 320,000 people whose cases were finalised had actually left South Africa.
“The finalised cases of 320,000 or so get handed over to law enforcement, in the form of the inspectorate, for these clients to be processed out of the country,” Madumisa said.
“The inspectorate is best placed to determine, in terms of the numbers, how they have dealt with that volume,”
ATM leader Vuyolwethu Zungula pressed the department on what had happened to those whose cases were inactive, closed or rejected.
“What is the status of the 800,000 inactive and the 320,000 closed applications? And those applicants that have been rejected, where are they? Have they been deported or are they in the country?” Zungula asked.
Madumisa said the department rejects most first-time asylum applications. “that 95% rejection rate is informed by current operations,” he said.
The department also faces a shortage of officials responsible for deciding asylum claims.
Madumisa said the five refugee reception offices have a combined total of 96 refugee status determination officers. These are the only officials legally authorised to decide asylum applications.
Refugee Appeals Authority of South Africa chairperson Zilpha Raphesu, told the committee that the authority was dealing with 161,000 outstanding cases.
The backlog stood at 133,000 when a project to address it began in October 2021, with support from the United Nations refugee agency.
The authority told Parliament in May that the backlog remained at 161,000 cases, including 90,024 inactive cases.
The problem is not new. In 2019, Home Affairs told Parliament that 694,481 asylum cases were inactive. By 2022, the figure had risen to 736,372.
In a parliamentary reply that year, the department said it lacked the capacity to establish whether asylum seekers still lived at the addresses they had initially provided or had left the country.
The latest figures leave a key question unanswered, how many of those who stopped reporting to Home Affairs remain in South Africa, and how many of those whose claims were closed or rejected have actually been removed from the country?
