Motsoaledi escalates ZEP termination battle to Constitutional Court
The minister has already made two unsuccessful attempts to appeal the ruling, first in the High Court and then in the Supreme Court of Appeal.
FILE: Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi. Picture: GCIS.
JOHANNESBURG - Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has escalated the battle over the termination of the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP) programme to the country’s apex court.
In 2023, the High Court in Pretoria declared as unconstitutional his decision to scrap the programme, under which some 178,000 Zimbabwean nationals have been living and working in South Africa for over a decade now.
This was on the back of a challenge from the Helen Suzman Foundation and the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa.
The minister has already made two unsuccessful attempts to appeal the ruling, first in the same court and then in the Supreme Court of Appeal.
Motsoaledi is fighting tooth and nail to try and salvage his decision to scrap the ZEP programme.
In refusing him leave to appeal, the High Court found that because the answering affidavit submitted in the initial application was deposed to by Home Affairs director-general Livhuwani Makhode and not Motsoaledi, who was the decision maker, was inadmissible.
As a result, it found further there was no admissible evidence before the court regarding what the minister had taken into consideration before making the decision.
In the papers before the Constitutional Court, though, Makhode maintains that the High Court got it wrong and that it couldn’t make such a finding on appeal when it hadn’t “expressly” held as much in its first judgment and had in fact “scrutinised” the defences they’d raised therein.
He also maintains that he is better positioned to submit an affidavit in any case.