Marion Edmunds
The Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr Frene Ginwala, has a British passport, which has been renewed since the April elections. She denies it represents a lack of faith in her own country.
Ginwala said this week she always travelled on her South African passport, and that she did not think that she had the right of residence in the United Kingdom.
Ginwala explained that she had had to have a British passport before April 1994 to make it easy to travel while she was in exile, while working for the ANC.
She said that ANC exiles had travelled on British, Swedish, Mozambican, Tanzanian and Liberian passports among others. Ginwala said her British passport did not reflect a lack of confidence in the South African government and that she had not intentionally renewed her British passport.
She said that she had applied this year for a letter from the British Embassy to give her freedom of movement in the European Union, because it was often difficult to get visas. The British Embassy had responded to her request by renewing her passport.
Ginwala said former exiles had foreign passports because of the apartheid past, and that they should be viewed differently from those South Africans — such as judges, accountants, businessmen — who had foreign passports because they were “settlers”.
“The brain-drain people, South Africans who had British ancestry. They are a totally different category from those who were political exiles and are now in Parliament,” she said.