EDITORIAL | Asylum ruling: the distortions, vigilantism are shameful

The black smoke rising over Durban’s Che Guevara Road on Thursday is more than the by-product of burning tyres, ransacked stalls and torched vehicles . It also represents the grim, inevitable result of a much more toxic and dangerous fire stoked deliberately by political opportunism and reckless disinformation.

The scenes that played out outside the department of home affairs’ (DHA) Refugee Reception Centre this week, which culminated in running street battles, stun grenades and arson on Thursday, demands an immediate pause and urgent national reflection.

South Africa has walked down this precarious road of xenophobic vigilantism too many times before. We know it leads to bloodshed, the breakdown of the rule of law, and international shame.

At the centre of Thursday’s chaos ― yet another shameful moment ― is a catastrophic and wilful distortion of the Constitutional Court’s recent judgment in the Scalabrini Centre matter.

When the apex court ruled against procedural barriers that summarily shut out asylum seekers without a fair hearing, it did not suddenly tear open the borders. It did not declare open season for illegal immigration, and most certainly did not grant blanket amnesty or hand out permanent residence to anyone standing in a queue.

It simply upheld the foundational constitutional principle of due process which affirms that an application must be evaluated on its legal merits.

In the cynical arena that is the South African political discourse, not even the wisdom of the grey heads at the highest court in the land can survive the race for populist outrage.

Consuming, reposting and forwarding rage-bait uncritically makes every citizen an unwitting accomplice to the violence that unfolded in Durban on Thursday.

In an atmosphere already charged by the upcoming local government elections, influential parties, fringe, opaque movements and self-styled activists have seized upon the judgment to manufacture panic.

Deceptive narratives have run rampant, with reports of claims that the GNU is quietly engineering a mass regularisation project, viral voice notes alleging that foreign nationals are being queued up for Sassa grants, and that one local government election candidate in Johannesburg is in fact an illegal masquerading as a South African.

To conflate the basic administrative right to apply for asylum with the guaranteed granting of citizenship or voter registration is not merely ignorant.