Primrose Modisane, who was born in Zimbabwe, has battled to have her South African citizenship recognised despite being entitled to it by descent through her grandmother
Primrose Modisane is, and has always been, a South African. She now has a birth certificate to prove it.
Her story is sobering. Everyday acts of life that the rest of us take for granted were denied to her. She was unable to get a driver’s licence, catch a plane, take a long bus ride, open a bank account or even register her daughter at school.
But her wide smiles this week come from more than those avenues opening up. She now has her dignity.
“The way we were welcomed when we walked into home affairs,” she told our reporter, Sheree Bega. “I can feel that I’m also important, that I have rights and that I’m also a human being.”
There’s irony in the idea that the stuffy home affairs department, a place most of us see as nothing more or less than a nuisance, holds supreme power over our lives. Our blasé attitude to that fact is a privilege.
Modisane has been denied that privilege for 36 years — as have countless other “stateless” people within our borders who are still languishing in that obscurity.
For all the feel-good vibes of Modisane’s outcome this week, it is infuriating to read about all she has gone through to get to this point. And how much of the needless toil she endured could have been avoided had she been dealt with by more conscientious bureaucrats.
Home affairs has long been troubled. The media has widely covered its travails over the years. There have sporadically been spurts of much-publicised improvement, but ultimately it has failed to achieve universal recognition as efficient and inclusive.
We have offered tentative praise to incumbent Minister Leon Schreiber during his first year in the job. His department’s implemented reforms have, by many accounts, made home affairs offices more competent and cleared up the behind-doors backlogs that infected all systems around it.
But it is clear that there is still much work before we can declare his tenure a success. And it will involve more than pedestrian resource management.
Modisane put the issue succinctly: “I don’t think the problem is with the government, I think it’s the people that we meet, the attitudes that we get from the people that are behind the desk.”
South African public service has been bedeviled by apathetic officials. The rot is deep and contagious. The issue is compounded in home affairs offices where discrimination — much like the xenophobia we’ve seen manifested outside of our hospitals — is unashamed.
Until a major cultural shift is undertaken, Primrose Modisane will not be the last person whom the system fails.