Primrose Modisane finally has her ID number but it came at a high price. Her mother Phumulani Tshuma died of incurable throat cancer in 2023, just four months after she got her ID card, which Modisane is pictured holding. (Photo: Madelene Cronjé/LHR)News & Features
22nd August 2025 | Joan van Dyk
When South Africans get caught up in the country’s often dysfunctional home affairs system, sometimes even DNA evidence isn’t enough to prove their citizenship. This can, among others, have consequences for people’s ability to access healthcare services. For foreign nationals, navigating the system can be even harder.
On 7 August 2025, Primrose Modisane, 36, flickered back into legal existence outside a Home Affairs office in Germiston, just 20 kilometers from the spot where she had evaporated 17 years earlier.
Back in 2008, officials from the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) arrived at her high school in Vosloorus, south of Boksburg, as part of a documentation drive. That was when she learned that as far as the South African government was concerned, she did not exist and neither did her mother.
They were “stateless”, which means no country recognised them as citizens. There are at least 10 000 stateless people in South Africa, and those most affected are orphaned and abandoned infants, and children born to parents of different nationalities.
People become stateless for a range of reasons. In South Africa, Home Affairs has stripped hundreds of thousands of people of their citizenship by blocking IDs of people deemed suspicious, a process that can take years to correct. (Meet nine stateless children trapped in Home Affairs paper prisons.)
Statelessness is also fuelled by mismatched laws, discrimination, delayed birth registration or, as with Modisane, procedural barriers.
Her Grade 11 results would be the last legal trace of her for nearly two decades. Unable to write her matric exams without a birth certificate and ID number, she abandoned her dream of studying social work, left school and got a job as a domestic worker.
She’s been unable to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, take a long distance bus, sign a lease, marry or vote.
Now, she finally has the 13-digits that could change her fortune.
In photos of Modisane’s clerical reappearance in early August, she’s beaming beside her 91-year-old grandmother. Celebratory pink balloons float behind them.
Not pictured is Modisane’s mother, Phumulani Tshuma. She died of throat cancer in 2023, just four months after she got her ID card. The government, which had DNA evidence of Tshuma’s citizenship as early as 2017, recognised Tshuma as a South African citizen when it was already too late. She was 51.
These women and girls represent four generations of South Africans who have paid a high price to prove their nationality.
They’ve been luckier than most. Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) – a non-profit – has championed their case for more than a decade, and the family Modisane has worked for since 2014 has taken on her documentation fight as if it were their own. They also happen to be related to a retired constitutional court judge, the human rights lawyer Johan Kriegler.
This family’s story is nonetheless one of grief, financial ruin, public humiliation, and contemptuous treatment at the hands of government officials.
Belonging is a series on statelessness in South Africa. This is the story of Nosipho and Ayanda and their struggle for citizenship.
Just beyond Modisane’s moment of celebration lurks the unsettling reality that this is unlikely to be a turning point for anybody else. For the thousands of stateless people still stuck in the system Modisane has left behind, hope may fade long before the helium balloons she’s holding lose their lift.
New draft legislation that could replace the country’s existing citizenship laws betrays a system that may shed its veneer of hospitality.
The 186-page document evokes ANC founding member Sol Plaatjie’s denunciation of the apartheid-era Native’s Land Act, which he said turned the South African native into “a pariah in the land of his birth” overnight.
If the draft is signed into law, critics charge it will fuel statelessness. In letters to the Department of Home Affairs, UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF, LHR, CormSA and SERI cautioned against its plan to repeal part of the law that allows people to gain South African citizenship through naturalisation.
A time of intensifying xenophobia
All this comes at a time of flagrant and intensifying xenophobia. The vigilante group turned political party, Operation Dudula, has in recent months ramped up its unlawful attacks of migrants at government clinics.
Every person in South Africa has a constitutional right to health services regardless of their documentation status, and facilities cannot refuse care during an emergency. Non-citizens and citizens alike pay for certain health services depending on their income, except in the case of children under six and pregnant women, for whom healthcare is free.
Dudula’s leaders are unperturbed by the government’s threats of arrest.
A new assessment by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) found that at least 50 people, many of them pregnant women, have been denied access to healthcare in recent weeks. The review spanned 24 healthcare facilities in and around Johannesburg, Durban and Tshwane.
A 33-year-old pregnant woman with high blood pressure told MSF that a man waving a South African ID book appeared at a Gauteng hospital and told everyone without an ID or permit to leave.
“The nurses were there, and they started laughing, supporting him,” she says. “They said we don’t pay tax, and they are tired of us. They said we can go; it will be less work for them.”
On the actions taken by Operation Dudula in healthcare facilities, Dr Dhlomo said he was glad that the Minister of @HealthZA has held engagements with stakeholders around access to healthcare by foreign nationals. “These concerns cannot be ignored or wished away, but we need an… pic.twitter.com/I39vTgf0Tg
— Parliament of RSA (@ParliamentofRSA) August 21, 2025
The health department’s spokesperson, Foster Mohale, told Spotlight that health workers are bound by the oath they signed upon qualifying, to treat patients regardless of their social standing, wealth or other personal characteristics.
During a three-hour meeting with Dudula on 13 August, Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi reiterated this point, saying health workers and the government have ethical and legal responsibilities to care for everyone.
Dudula’s actions, Motsoaledi warned in an interview with SABC, undermine the rights of both migrants and South African nationals.
“We in health, and even operation Dudula, have no way of knowing who is South African just with documents. [Dudula] will turn away South Africans who don’t have documents. They are not illegal, they are in their country,” Motsoaledi said.
Despite evidence that Dudula is attacking people with and without documents, the group’s president, Zandile Dabula, told Spotlight her members are instructed to distinguish between foreign nationals and undocumented citizens.
“Our focus is on addressing the challenges posed by illegal foreigners, which adds pressure to already stretched resources and opportunities. In cases involving undocumented South Africans, our role is to stand with them, not against them,” she says.
But the health system cannot resolve Dudula’s grievances anyway, says Motsoaledi. That responsibility lies with the Department of Home Affairs, which issues identity documents and is in the process of overhauling South Africa’s immigration laws, reforms Motsoaledi himself set in motion during his tenure as Home Affairs minister between 2019 and 2024.
Kriegler is seated opposite Modisane at a kitchen table in Johannesburg. He has known Modisane for years since she works for his daughter, Sophia Welz, who has accompanied the family on their quest for legal recognition since 2017.
When Spotlight spoke with Kriegler, Welz and Modisane on 3 August, it was the Sunday before a big week. The trio were gearing up for a press conference, their last ditch attempt to put pressure on the government.
Their gambit paid off. Hours before the event was set to begin, Home Affairs called to say Modisane’s birth certificate was ready to be collected.
“I’m uncomfortable about influence,” Kriegler says of his choice not to intervene earlier. “Quite frankly, it’s very close to corruption.” But the human rights lawyer says he couldn’t ignore what he’d witnessed over the last three months.
Defying a high court order
In April, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria ordered Home Affairs to issue Modisane’s birth certificate and South African ID document within 30 days.
“It should have been a routine matter,” he explains. But May, June and most of July came and went.
Then, as August approached, Modisane got a phone call from a provincial administrative secretary in Gauteng. At first she thought he was calling to say her documents were ready, but it soon became clear that he was about to start the process all over again.
The man didn’t understand that a judge had settled this matter, or he didn’t care. Modisane says he told her that she wasn’t special, many people were waiting for their documents, and that he would close her case if she wouldn’t meet them half way.
‘I will struggle and die just like my mom’
In that moment, years of grief and rage bubbled over. Her voice breaks as she repeats her reaction: “If you can’t help me then I will struggle and die just like my mom did.”
Department of Home Affairs spokesperson Thulani Mavuso suggests Modisane is partly responsible for the delays before the High Court ruled in her favour in April because she didn’t submit a birth certificate with her application as required by law. Spotlight sent the department a detailed list of questions but received only a broad response – you can read that response in full here.
But Modisane’s argument is that the problem is not that she was unwilling to bring evidence of her birth, it’s that documented evidence did not exist and the department refused to help even when she provided DNA evidence of her citizenship.
This is the moment that changed things for Kriegler.
By July of 2025, LHR had submitted a string of letters and petitions on Modisane’s behalf over the course of nearly 10 years. They had helped to bring her family’s story to the attention of the Gauteng provincial manager for Home Affairs and representatives in Parliament, where officials had tried in vain to end her predicament. Now, the judiciary had weighed in too but they were all powerless, Home Affairs didn’t budge.
The next legal step would have been to file an application for Home Affairs to be held in contempt of court, but that could take years, Kriegler explains, and time was of the essence. If Modisane didn’t get her ID number soon, she wouldn’t be able to apply for fee exemptions in time for her youngest daughter to start secondary school with her peers.
Says Kriegler: “This is a major constitutional issue.”
There’s a broader betrayal at play for the human rights lawyer too.
“I’ve given this woman my word that the law will help her, and the law has helped her to nowhere. The frustration of it is indescribable, the disgrace and the humiliation,” he says.
In addition to Home Affairs sometimes not recognising citizens, it can also be extremely slow to update its policies and processes in response to legal developments. It might be 2025 when you join the queue at a branch office, but it seems the front desk is always stuck in the year the department’s internal policies were last updated. When it comes to citizenship issues, some revisions have lagged for more than a decade.
It’s a function of an ever-shrinking budget and a vast disconnect between the laws of South Africa, policies set at the national level and the chaos at branch offices.
Home Affairs has about 5 700 staff in its “Citizen Affairs” division nationwide, per its latest annual report, but only senior managers and identification experts who work at its head office in Tshwane can grant South African identification documents.
In theory, administrators at local offices are tasked with screening and standardising applications by following a process set out in a guidebook called a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), which is not available online. Spotlight has seen a Citizen Affairs guide dated 2021.
In reality, though, the Citizen Affairs SOP is missing important information, making it nearly impossible for people to follow the department’s rules, explains Liesl Muller, a senior attorney with the Centre for Child Law (CCL) at the University of Pretoria.
The home affairs department told Spotlight its Learning Academy trains staff to stay abreast of updates but didn’t explain why SOPs are outdated.
How speaking out can harm
It can also be risky to speak out, as Modisane and Welz saw first-hand.
Welz accompanied Modisane, her late mother and grandmother to the Germiston office in 2021. They were certain that Modisane’s presentation to the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs would end their dilemma because it resulted in an intervention by the provincial director-general, but the women left without having made much progress.
They say the office manager, who did not respond to Spotlight’s queries, was furious, and she took aim at Modisane’s 89-year-old grandmother, a born South African who had come armed with all her documents, hoping to improve the lives of her daughter, granddaughter and great-grandchildren at long last.
Welz recalls the woman’s accusation: “You’re a border jumper, hey? You got me into trouble, but it doesn’t matter. You can go to the media if you want but I’m doing my job.”
This video by the Centre for Child Law and the South African Human Rights Commission is to help children in South Africa learn about citizenship and how a person becomes a citizen of a country.
For stateless children attempting to get their documents, time froze eleven years ago. South African law allows stateless children to be recognised as citizens, but the department admits that there’s no official form or regulation people can use to apply at local offices, despite a 2014 order from the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria demanding the process be updated and another by the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in 2016.
In 2021, several regulations that relate to the registration of births and deaths were scrapped. The Constitutional Court ruled that unmarried fathers, for instance, must be able to register their children in the absence of the mother when she’s unavailable. But Home Affairs’ latest directive still doesn’t comply with the ruling, Muller says. The process still discriminates against children born out of wedlock since single fathers have to provide DNA evidence of their paternity.
She explains: “They have not complied with the court order; they have just changed the rules for fathers who can now still not apply, just for a different reason.”
This video by the Centre for Child Law and the South African Human Rights Commission is to help children in South Africa learn about the importance of birth registration and how to get birth registration, including a birth certificate from the Department of Home Affairs.
The CCL alerted the parliamentary portfolio committee for Home Affairs to these issues, and the committee confirmed receipt, but that’s where the correspondence ended. A new minister was then appointed and a new parliamentary committee was established following the 2024 national elections.
Home Affairs’ performance plan for 2025 mentions a review of its policies and acknowledges that outdated and unlawful processes are driving litigation. In 2023 alone the department owed over R600 million in ‘civics’ legal costs, though the actual payouts might be lower.
Statelessness itself is costly too. A 2012 study conducted in four countries found stateless households spend and earn on average 33% less than documented households.
In 2024, the World Bank and UNHCR analysed the impact of citizenship on the Shona, a community in Kenya that was stateless until 2020. The study surveyed at least one adult in 386 households, which the authors say covers the entire Shona population in Kenya.
The researchers found that employment rates, job security and income stability were all up, and financial inclusion surged. The number of people who had a bank account tripled. Surveyed people reported increased feelings of trust, belonging and connection to the broader nation. Half of the people who were surveyed say their lives have greatly improved since they got their documents and nearly 70% of respondents said they felt “very hopeful” about the future.
Watch Primrose tell her story in Parliament
In this video to the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs in Parliament, Primerose Modisane tells her story as a stateless person.
Making Home Affairs more welcoming for people like Modisane won’t be straight-forward. The department is already operating at just 40% capacity, and staff work hours were extended earlier this year without extra pay. Exhaustion, inadequate performance management and persistent connectivity problems also complicate matters.
Home Affairs offices can be a demoralising and scary environment for staff as well, according to a March parliamentary oversight report. In the North West, staff reported that the premises fail to meet occupational health standards, that offices were not equipped with burglar bars and got robbed often as a result.
But ignorance and prejudice derails the process too.
Fear being asked where she was born
As Modisane’s 17-year ordeal stretched on, for instance, she learned to fear being asked where she was born. The answer to this question is Zimbabwe, and she says saying so reliably invited abuse.
Modisane says she has witnessed Home Affairs’ administrative staff, senior managers, secretaries and in one instance, a sitting High Court judge, respond to this information with varying degrees of disgust, not to mention ignorance of South Africa’s laws.
People born of a South African parent qualify for citizenship even if they were born elsewhere.
In March, the Western Cape High Court ruled that staff exercise discretion that amounts to gatekeeping, and that they’re unlawfully stopping people from submitting applications.
This kind of thing is familiar to Modisane. Back in 2021, when a Home Affairs manager allegedly accused her grandmother of being a border jumper, she allegedly also forced the elderly woman to speak English and refused to look at all the official documents she had brought along.
The manager then offered what Welz thinks could have been her own tamper-proof test of belonging: “If you were really South African, you would have a dompass.”
Of course, some staff misgivings aren’t always unfounded. Police operations in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal have uncovered a syndicate that issues South African residence permits, IDs and passports in exchange for money, but these schemes also implicate dozens of Home Affairs staff, not just undocumented people.
Modisane says she memorised her new ID number on the same day Home Affairs handed it over.
All her life, she says she has moved through her home province of Gauteng on high-alert, worried that somebody will find out she’s a legal non-person.
After her mother died, she also became afraid of falling ill, paranoid that symptoms of a common cold were really the first signs that she would also die in pain.
To avoid a confrontation with Operation Dudula, Modisane would travel to Vosloorus for medical help because nurses there know her. Even that option is gone now. Her cousins back home say Dudula is patrolling those facilities too.
“I’ve lived my whole life here [in South Africa], I know the food, the culture,” Modisane says.
Her fondest childhood memories are all in Vosloorus, where the family still gathers.
Her grandmother still lives there, in the same corrugated iron structure in which Modisane was raised. She remembers cooking for her younger cousins and rushing to put buckets in places where rain leaked through the roof. “That bush, it’s our home,” she says.
Modisane says she’s excited to swim in the ocean, especially since she can now travel there by plane. But that’s where her aspirations for herself end.
She’s no longer interested in joining the ranks of social workers because she says they’ve treated her so poorly. Perhaps she’ll become a driver when she’s too old for domestic work, Modisane says flatly.
When Spotlight asked Modisane how she’ll respond to future questions about where she’s from, she falls silent, then says: “I’ll have to say I’m South African, but I’m not proud to be.”
Disclosure: Kriegler was previously the chair of SECTION27’s board. Spotlight is published by SECTION27, but is editorially independent – an independence that the editors guard jealously. Spotlight is a member of the South African Press Council.
