In a reply to a DA parliamentary question, the Department of Home Affairs revealed that it has spent R46.3 million on legal costs in 2011/2012. This is more than double the R21.3 million spent in the previous financial year.
These soaring costs are likely attributable to the fact that the Department’s immigration services are a complete disaster and they continuously fail to comply with court orders. The reply indicates that the legal costs were compounded by missing documents, lack of capacity and administrative errors.
An efficient and effective department should not be spending this amount of money on legal costs resulting from their own administrative failures.
Significant savings on legal fees could be had if the Department actually spent more money on staff to deal with applications. It currently employs only nine permanent residence adjudicators who had to deal with 73 499 applications last year.
It is the responsibility of Director-General (DG) Mkuseli Apleni to ensure that the immigration service runs smoothly. Massive backlogs in applications remain, however, and there are currently three contempt of court lawsuits against the department.
As the DA has pointed out previously, the current DG has presided over R800 million in irregular expenditure in three years and now we can add the doubling of legal costs to his list of failures. He has continuously violated the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) over the last three years and is wasting public funds on his department’s inefficiency.
Surely Mister Apleni is not performing the core functions of his office.
I have written to the new Minister of Home Affairs, Naledi Pandor, to ask that she institutes disciplinary proceedings against Director General Apleni for his failure to comply with the PFMA. The Minister should, however, also consider Mr Apleni’s role in immigration applications and the bloating legal costs of the Department.
This Department is failing in a core service area. Minister Pandor must take steps to ensure that she gets the appropriate administrative leadership in place to deliver on her Department’s mandate.
No comments:
Post a Comment