Schreiber waives 60-day visa filing rule — too little, too late

One year to the day after I warned that South Africa’s 60-day visa filing rule had become a trap, the minister of home affairs has granted a blanket waiver by signing Immigration Directive 13 of 2026, whereby he finally acknowledges the “unintended consequences” of the rigid application of regulations 9(8)(c) and 9(5)(a). Whilst this is a necessary course correction, it is also one that has arrived too late. 

Immigration Directive 13 of 2026 covers pending applications for visa extensions, as well as changes of status or conditions. In an unprecedented curative measure, it also extends to pending appeals arising from a failure to lodge an application 60 days before the expiry of the existing visa. It therefore addresses not only future filings, but also the substantial backlog of pending matters caused by the Department of Home Affairs’ own rigid practice.

It would be both worthwhile and a tangible act of accountability for Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs to establish how many of the pending appeals now clogging the department’s machinery arise from nothing more than the mechanical application of the 60-day rule.

The 60-day requirement has existed in the regulations since 2014 as a filing discipline and was not treated as an unbending bar. Applicants who had “good cause” for applying within the validity of their visas, but fewer than 60 days before their expiry, could explain the circumstances and ask for condonation for the late filing with no adverse consequence in the adjudication process. 

When Minister Leon Schreiber took the helm in mid-2024, ambitiously wanting to tame the backlog of visa applications, that logic was abandoned in favour of what was called greater efficiency in “eradicating a historical backlog” and target outputs that could be reported. This did not make the system more lawful; it made it more brittle.

Administrative guillotine

Section 33 of the Constitution and the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act require administrative action to be lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair. The Department of Home Affairs is entitled to expect compliance with immigration rules, but it is not entitled to turn a rule designed to facilitate orderly administration into a punitive, mechanical guillotine, applied without regard to its purpose or to the landscape in which it operates: a frail, poorly coordinated and inefficient visa-processing system that has struggled since the lockdown to process applications within any reasonable timeframe.

The human consequences have been far-reaching, foreseeable and avoidable.

The combined effect of this guillotine in action, coupled with the denial of protections to applicants aggrieved by persisting delays not covered by Immigration Directive 7 of 2026, simply because their applications were not submitted on or before 30 March, has been even worse for those faced with these unnecessary and unwarranted rejections. 

These applications have sometimes taken well in excess of one year to be processed, only to be refused not on their merits or substance but merely because a timeline was missed. Most applicants were unaware of this deadline, especially since applications doomed to be refused were routinely accepted for processing on digital platforms that clearly reflected visa-expiry dates, all while collecting submission-service and government fees.

That combination, which saw applicants gradually cut out from concessions granted as favours, resulted in foreign professionals losing the ability to continue working, students having their enrolment interrupted, and families facing separation or forced departure after doing nothing more than what remaining lawfully in South Africa requires: applying before their visas expired for a new status.

Bank accounts have been frozen or closed, employers have lost skilled staff, and businesses have lost continuity. People spent money they did not have to lodge appeals and seek legal assistance simply to challenge a refusal based on timing rather than merit.

Clear as the sky

Directive 13 is welcome, but it also represents another institutional acknowledgement that the approach was wrong in practice and destructive in effect. Legal ambiguity does not help any democratic system, and even less so one already weakened over years of mismanagement.

The minister also states in this directive that he has used the statutory power to intervene in response to “representations”, and one wonders why it took so long and how it could take so long. For anyone watching, the disastrous ramifications were as clear as the sky. Countless appeals submitted to both the director-general and the minister against irrational rejections of this nature should not have taken two years to be considered as valid parameters against which to test the fairness, lawfulness and rationality that just administrative action requires.

Administrative accountability begins with knowing the scale of the harm. Calling the consequences “unintended” correctly recognises their reality, but it cannot conclude the inquiry. The question is why the department failed to consider the predictable results of a hard cut-off applied after years of backlogs and appointment scarcity, and whether anyone tested the legality and proportionality of the practice before adverse decisions were issued at scale. Public power requires that discipline before damage, not only after it.

Competence and fairness

South Africa needs immigration administration that is firm, predictable and capable. Those goals do not compete with fairness; they depend on it. If Schreiber is listening, he must now act to extend the protections afforded by Directive 7 to all applicants whose temporary-residence applications and appeals remain pending, until the department can deliver reasonable adjudication timeframes. 

The department’s own projected turnaround timeframes, published in Circular 8 of 2026, are telling of a far greater problem that still persists. There is no need to wait for the guillotine to become double-bladed before preventing what has unfolded in plain sight.   

The minister has shown through Directive 13 that he is prepared to use his statutory power to correct a manifestly irrational outcome. That authority must now be matched by enduring protection for applicants who have complied with the law and by an administration capable of deciding applications before its own delays destroy the lawful status it is obliged to administer. Only when competence is matched by fairness can we truly celebrate a new Department of Home Affairs. DM