The department of home affairs is suspending two senior officials with immediate effect after AI “hallucinations” were found in the reference list appended to the revised white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection – the second time in less than a week that a cabinet-approved South African policy document has been caught with AI-fabricated sources.
A chief director in the unit responsible for the white paper was placed on precautionary suspension on Thursday afternoon, with a director involved in the drafting process to follow on Monday, home affairs said in a statement.
The department has appointed two independent law firms – one to manage the disciplinary process and one to review every policy document it has produced since 30 November 2022, the day OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public. Home affairs has also committed to designing AI checks and declarations into its internal approval processes.
The revised white paper, championed by home affairs minister Leon Schreiber as the most fundamental reform of South Africa’s citizenship and immigration framework in a generation, was approved by cabinet on 3 April. The department said its initial review suggests the suspect references were generated and tacked on to the document after the fact – they are not cited in the body of the text. The reference list has been withdrawn pending the outcome of the independent probe.
The body of the white paper, DHA insisted, “continues to accurately reflect the government’s position” and is “not materially affected” by the apparent hallucinations. “The department nonetheless sincerely apologises for this unacceptable oversight,” it said, describing the episode as “an opportunity to further modernise our internal processes”.
AI policy
The suspensions come four days after communications & digital technologies minister Solly Malatsi withdrew the entire draft national AI policy in the wake of a News24 report that at least six of its 67 academic citations were fabricated AI hallucinations – fictional articles attributed to real journals and to authors who had never written on the topics in question. Cabinet approved that policy on 25 March, and it was gazetted for public comment on 10 April.
Malatsi, in a statement on his X account on Sunday, said the most plausible explanation was that “AI-generated citations were included without proper verification”. He pledged “consequence management” for those responsible for drafting and quality assurance, calling the episode an “unacceptable lapse” that proved why “vigilant human oversight over the use of artificial intelligence is critical”.
The parliamentary portfolio committee chair overseeing Malatsi’s department, Khusela Diko, suggested the department “skip using ChatGPT this time” when redrafting the policy.
Read: ANC piles pressure on Malatsi over AI policy fiasco
The pattern raises pointed questions about how widely the practice has taken hold across the public sector. It is presumably the reason home affairs has now committed to reviewing every policy document it has produced over the past three-and-a-half years. It also raises questions about the quality assurance processes that allowed two cabinet-approved documents in quick succession to clear internal scrutiny with manufactured references attached. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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