South Africa: Hidden struggles of citizenship and how Home Affairs bureaucracy obstructs legal belonging
Published: 13/Nov/2025
Source: Daily Maverick (Johannesburg)
By Claudia Pizzocri,
Claudia Pizzocri is CEO at immigration and citizenship law firm Eisenberg & Associates.
In South Africa, liminality has migrated from anthropology into government administration practice, particularly in matters that pertain to citizenship. In its condescending routine the Department of Home Affairs has manufactured a state of de facto “in-between” by building practical barriers with locked gates that the department holds the keys to.
Public administration literature describes this phenomenon as part of a “street-level bureaucracy” whereby wide frontline discretion, uneven application of rules, and processes structured by local practice rather than by published standards defeats lawful process.
The verification wall
Before a naturalisation application is processed, the department must first attend to verifying a permanent residence status. The verification process, which the department controls, is meant to establish several things before an application for naturalisation can be processed.
These include:
- The legitimate nature of a permit, considering that many fraudulent permits are still in circulation.
- The compliance with any condition attached to the permit, as non-compliance may lead to the withdrawal of a status.
- The status being current.
- Specific to a citizenship application — testing the legislative physical presence threshold (i.e. not having been absent from the republic for more than 90 days per year in any of the five years preceding the application).
The issue here is that this verification process can take years. Oftentimes, individuals are forced to resubmit verification after verification as their files seem to have been lost in a space of apathetic bureaucracy, with no real explanation forthcoming.
While it is undisputed that such a prerequisite verification process is necessary and legitimate prior to awarding citizenship, as in terms of section 5(7) the minister has wide powers “to make such enquiries as [he] may deem fit”, the fact that there exists no national service standard for its turnaround, nor published data on the numbers of these pending verifications, has created a jammed system. No visible accountability exists for those patiently waiting for this step to be concluded, enabling their naturalisation applications to be processed.
In practice, the verification process has become a perfectly engineered checkpoint: apparently technical and neutral, yet decisive in obstructing the pathway to citizenship for those who lawfully qualify and who are left inside invisible queues that exist everywhere and appear nowhere.