MK MP Sihle Ngubane has accused Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber of keeping an adviser from the organisation that keeps beating the department in court.
Ngubane told Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs on Friday that the committee had received complaints about “this Scalabrini person”. He did not mention him by name.
“We’ve raised these issues again and again and again, about the number of email addresses and complaints we received about this Scalabrini person who’s sitting in the advisory committee of the Minister, to say, is he advising the Minister on behalf of South Africans or against South Africa?” Ngubane said.
“So it’s clear now they will win cases over and over while they sit with the Minister, instead of advising him how to win cases, how to handle issues of immigration,” he complained.
The Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town brought the case in which the Constitutional Court struck down parts of the Refugees Act on 7 July. That ruling led to the asylum directive that Home Affairs withdrew on Friday.
“We are concerned about this guy who is representing Scalabrini in the advisory of the Minister. We want to know what value is he adding in the Minister’s advisory, when all the time he’s part of the Minister’s advisory and all of a sudden he goes and challenges Home Affairs,” said Ngubane.
He said the department’s lawyers keep losing.
“Home Affairs, why is your legal department failing us left, right and centre?. When you go and take these cases to court, do you get advice, do you get proper lawyers and legal advice before you go and defend this thing?” he asked.
He said South Africa should pull out of its UN refugee treaties.
“We need to look at how the government of South Africa can withdraw from all these treaties that they signed with the United Nations, because it looks like they are at our expense. These treaties are not serving us right. So we need to look at withdrawing from all of them,” Ngubane said.
Home Affairs Director-General Thommy Makhode said that would change.
He said the Department of International Relations and Cooperation had received three legal opinions on withdrawing from the UN refugee convention, which South Africa signed in 1996.
“Even if you were to withdraw from the UN Convention, your own Constitution still mirrors the convention. Your own Bill of Rights still mirrors the convention, and therefore you will not have done much,” Makhode said.
He said no country has ever successfully withdrawn.
Makhode did not respond to Ngubane’s claims about the adviser.
Ngubane said Schreiber had failed the country.
“Seriously, Minister Schreiber has failed South Africans, and the Department of Home Affairs has failed South Africans. The Minister is undermining, is ignorant, is aloof, is burying the head in the sand, is even misleading this portfolio committee,” he said.
He called the department’s modernisation drive a distraction. “We are busy chasing the shadow of ourselves with this project while our house is burning,” Ngubane said.
He said either the Constitution or the immigration laws must change.
“Either we need to amend our Constitution to align with all these laws that we have in Home Affairs that are against the Constitution, or we need to go and visit all these laws of the country that are against the Constitution,” he said.
Ngubane also took aim at Parliament’s legal adviser. “I hear the legal team lady who spoke before this. She says that there is nothing that must be changed in the Refugees Act,” he said.
That is not what Advocate Van der Merwe of Parliament’s Legal Services told the committee. She said “the statute book needs to be cleaned up”, and recommended “a consideration to give effect to this judgment in legislation.”
Schreiber revived the Immigration Advisory Board after it had been inactive for more than a decade. Its independent members include James Chapman, head of advocacy and legal adviser at the Scalabrini Centre.
In August, the committee resolved to get a legal opinion on a perceived conflict of interest involving a different board member, immigration attorney Stefanie de Saude-Darbandi, who is litigating against the department.
Schreiber has said board members advise only on policy and do not handle individual cases or legal challenges against the state.
Parliament’s Legal Services briefed the committee on 30 September on the perceived conflict of interest involving board members.