Pretoria - Hours before a court order jailing them for three months for contempt of court was to come into effect, the director-general of Home Affairs and his deputy complied with the order forcing them to issue a passport to a CSIR researcher.
Last month Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann gave Home Affairs director-general Mkuseli Apleni, and his deputy, Vusumuzi Mkhize, two weeks within which to issue a passport to Dr Yinwen Zhang.
He is employed as a post-doctoral fellow at the CSIR’s national laser centre and urgently needs to travel to New York where he is due to deliver a paper at a conference.
Zhang was refused a passport, although he is now a South-African citizen, as Home Affairs said his citizenship had been under investigation for the past 12 years.
He turned to court last month, where he obtained an order that his passport must be handed to him within two weeks, but the order seemed not to have assisted him at all.
Home Affairs did not give notice that it would oppose the application for his passport to be handed to him, nor was its lawyers in court.
The two senior officials at Home Affairs were cited as the respondents, as they held the power to issue the passport.
In an affidavit before court this week, Zhang’s lawyer, Andries Stander, said his candidate attorney phoned Home Affairs dozens of times following the order a month ago to ask when the passport would be ready. Officials either simply made empty promises or, most of the time, nobody answered the phone.
An urgent e-mail to Apleni regarding the court order was also ignored. Stander said the reason why the Home Affairs officials were powerless to issue the passport was because Apleni and Mkhize refused to provide them with the authorisation to do so. The two officials “willfully” disobeyed the court order, Stander said.
“The conduct of the respondents (Home Affairs and the two top officials) is yet another example of a senior government official who is willfully failing to comply with a valid court order.
“Public interest demands that this behaviour be dealt with swiftly,” Stander said.
He again turned to court this week for an order holding the officials in contempt of court, but this time battled to serve the application on the two officials.
His office asked Apleni’s secretary to show them where the notice could personally be served on him, but she refused. The secretary also said he would be out of the office for the week. Mkhize’s secretary also refused the document to be personally served on her boss, and said she would instead accept the document.
“It is clear that both respondents will attempt to evade personal service by hiding behind their secretaries,” Stander said.
Judge Segopotje Mphahlele on Tuesday gave the two officials 48 hours to comply with the previous court order and to issue the passport. If they did not, they had to face three months’ direct imprisonment.
The judge also ruled the sheriff may call on the police to arrest the two officials if they did not comply with the order, and to directly hand them over to prison officials in Pretoria to serve their sentence. Home Affairs yet again did not pitch in court to defend its actions. Shortly before lunch on Thursday Stander said Home Affairs “phoned Zhang to fetch his passport 10 minutes ago”.
Pretoria News