ANTHONY BUTLER: The strange morphing of Motsoaledi into a refugee-obsessed Suella

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

24 NOVEMBER 2023

As health minister during the Jacob Zuma decade, Aaron Motsoaledi came across as a decent person struggling with a difficult portfolio. What can explain his more recent — and mind-bogglingly crazy — initiatives in refugee policy and electoral reform? 

Motsoaledi is a classic ANC leader. Nephew of Rivonia trialist Elias Motsoaledi, he attended the University of Natal medical school, an institution that also produced Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Joe Phaahla, Zweli Mkhize, Joel Netshitenzhe and many, many others.

During the Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki periods he rose through the ranks of the Limpopo ANC. After one setback in 1998, when the premier fired him from the provincial executive, Zuma intervened to restore his fortunes.

In 2007, at Polokwane, he was again a beneficiary of Zuma’s largesse, being elected to the ANC national executive committee and soon after leapfrogging directly into the cabinet portfolio of health minister. 

His record there was really quite good. He focused on preventative health, rebuilt HIV/Aids and tuberculosis programmes, and memorably addressed safe sex fatigue by introducing multicoloured condoms. National Health Insurance, of course, proved terribly complicated.

By 2017 he had also tired of Zuma, and he was a core member of the political committee that drove Cyril Ramaphosa’s election as ANC president. Since then Motsoaledi’s trajectory has been deeply disappointing. 

Retained as health minister, he toured Gauteng hospitals in the run-up to the 2019 elections to lambaste pregnant foreigners for swamping health facilities. He told nurses that once immigrants “get admitted in large numbers, they cause overcrowding [and] infection control starts failing”.  

Motsoaledi moved to home affairs in 2019, where he deployed tactical xenophobia to neutralise ActionSA’s antiforeigner advantage and penalise the EFF for its unfashionable Pan-Africanism. He continued to fuel the rise of populist mafia groups such as Operation Dudula while ignoring court directives, for six years in the case of legislation concerning the detention of undocumented immigrants. In his newly consequence-ambivalent style he then simply “terminated” the Zimbabwean exemption permit. 

Now he has launched a white paper on citizenship, immigration and refugee protection that will further weaponise refugee issues, delegitimise courts that impose constraints on the abuse of executive power and repudiate long-fought advances in international law.  

There are eerie parallels with recently fired UK home affairs minister Suella Braverman. Her Motsoaledi-like initiatives — perhaps they share the same Bell Pottinger-type consultancy? —  have included sending asylum seekers to Rwanda and housing them in flammable barges.  

It is possible that the refugees are not the real issue. For her part, Braverman has been propping up the electoral position of the Conservatives by stoking fears of a migrant wave, while building a personal constituency among the party members who will soon elect their party’s new leader.  

In a playbook now tried and tested — from Budapest to Delhi and Mar-a-Largo — domestic courts and international conventions are viewed as mere collateral damage. Motsoaledi’s Electoral Amendment Act might provide him with opportunities to undermine the courts and flout their prescribed time frames.  

The idea of “independent” candidates did not spring fully formed from the fecund intellects of our brilliant justices, as some dinner-table conversationalists presume. A resolution calling for legislative changes to allow for independent candidates to participate in provincial and national elections was passed by the ANC conference at Polokwane in 2007, most likely to help manage the growing fallout from factional purges.  

In today’s more competitive electoral environment, sustaining the internal coherence and electoral dominance of the liberation movement is the most likely motivation for any such institutional or legislative reform.

To borrow a phrase, a politician like Braverman is a kind of human vampire bat, who will not balk at inflicting collateral damage on the courts, international law or refugees. Motsoaledi, we can hope, is still better than that. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.