My dear friends and fellow South Africans,

The present campaign of xenophobia is most disgraceful and lamentable. But it was predictable and was indeed predicted as much as thirteen years ago.

When I was the Minister of Home Affairs I established a process of policy formulation which drew into its fold top notch domestic and international experts who agreed on the need for having an open but controlled immigration policy for South Africa, so that we could acquire a moderate and useful measure of foreigners, rather than simply throwing the floodgates open.

For this reason, we adopted policies and passed legislation to establish an immigration control function which could exercise law enforcement at community level to ensure that, if the State and the law declared people to be illegally in South Africa, they could be treated as such.

We predicted that, as regrettable as it may be, when the State becomes absent and abdicates its duties and responsibilities, people see fit to take the law into their own hands, often for their own criminal purposes.

However, in spite of the wide international support they received and their common sense and practical approach, the immigration policies and legislation I found myself having to pilot were systematically frustrated, boycotted and thwarted while I was Minister, and ended up being abandoned after I left. Directors-General were appointed seemingly for the specific purpose of not implementing immigration policies which could address the problems. My legislation became the most difficult to pass bill in the history of the new Republic.

Similarly, my echoing request for political support to reform the obsolete refugee system were ignored, save for the support I received from the then Minister of Home Affairs of Australia. The system of refugee affairs foisted on us by international conventions and completely under-funded because of the dictates of Cabinet and the ruling Party, has caused the collapse of any rational efforts conducted by the State to maintain a degree of control over immigration.

Anyone who does not qualify for an immigration visa may merely apply for refugee status, thereby automatically gaining an asylum seeker's permit, which the State has no capacity to see through to the necessary and final hearings. This gives asylum seekers the right to stay in the country for years even though they would not qualify for an immigration permit.

Furthermore, the proposals set out in policy and entrenched in legislation for an Immigration Service which would exercise border control were equally ignored to the point of defying the prescripts of the law. In spite of my numerous requests to my then Director-General, and my calls to Parliament and the President to intervene to correct his defiance, the end result is that South Africa's borders are wide open and those who wish not to respect our immigration laws now have the option of just walking into our country illegally.

Conversely, all I did to make it easy for skilled people to enter South Africa and to facilitate those who wish to comply with our laws, has been reversed. Now, just as it was in the old South Africa, we have an immigration system which is inimical to business and also inimical to beneficial immigration and makes it hard for those who wish to comply with its provisions, while remaining impotent in respect of those who wish to defy it.

The present campaign of xenophobia is a horrendous symptom of this situation which ought not to be ignored, because of its deplorable aspects. The root cause lies in the failure of the State to exercise its legal and moral responsibilities.

Our people are neither xenophobic nor mean-spirited. The South African people are hospitable and generous, even when they have little or nothing to share. Their chief misfortune is that of having a less than fully competent Government, which has made enormous mistakes and has stuck by them with steadfast stubbornness, especially in the fields of immigration control and the fight against crime.

We must go beyond the ritual of condemning the present xenophobia, to point to the responsibilities of those who must be blamed for this foreseeable and indeed foreseen occurrence.

Yours sincerely,

Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi MP

This article by the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, was first published in his weekly newsletter May 21 2008