Every festive season, Mpumalanga becomes a gateway. Not only for holidaymakers and returning families, but for a growing number of undocumented foreign nationals entering South Africa illegally through porous borders.
While government issues routine assurances about “heightened security”, communities on the ground experience a different reality: overwhelmed clinics, overcrowded schools, strained housing, and law enforcement stretched beyond capacity.
ActionSA is deeply concerned by the scale of illegal border crossings into Mpumalanga, particularly during peak travel periods. This is not a theoretical policy debate, it is a lived crisis in towns and villages across the province. It speaks directly to the erosion of border control, the weakening of the rule of law, and the failure of intergovernmental coordination between Home Affairs, SAPS, Defence, and provincial authorities.
There is also a dangerous misconception that illegal foreigners primarily enter South Africa through official ports of entry. This is simply not true. Foreign nationals who pass through border posts such as Lebombo do so legally. They present documentation, are processed, and are granted lawful entry for a stipulated period. It is only when some overstay beyond that timeframe that they become undocumented. Those who enter illegally do so elsewhere, through unguarded stretches of the border, informal crossings, and routes well known to syndicates and smugglers. Conflating these realities distorts public understanding and shifts blame away from the state’s failure to secure the border itself.
Border security is not optional in a constitutional democracy. A state that cannot account for who enters and remains within its territory cannot plan, govern, or protect its citizens effectively. Yet year after year, South Africans are asked to accept dysfunction as inevitability.
Law enforcement alone cannot defeat this crisis. But law enforcement, supported by functioning institutions and an active, responsive citizenry, can make a decisive difference.
Public institutions, particularly in health, education, and social services, cannot remain passive observers. When undocumented individuals arrive at clinics, schools, or municipal offices seeking assistance, these institutions also carry a responsibility to uphold the law. Reporting unlawful presence to the relevant authorities is not cruelty; it is governance. It is how a state maintains order while still acting humanely.
Silence and inaction place an unfair burden on already thin resources. Every unrecorded patient, unaccounted learner, and unmonitored settlement stretches systems that are already failing South Africans. Communities end up competing for services that were never designed to absorb unlimited demand, breeding resentment, instability, and social fracture.
This is not a call for vigilantism or hostility. It is a call for responsibility.
South Africans must work together to curb the scourge of illegal immigration within our borders. A functioning state depends not only on police and soldiers, but on institutions that act lawfully and citizens who understand that order is a shared obligation. Reporting unlawful presence to the appropriate authorities is part of that civic duty.
A country governed by laws cannot selectively enforce them. Compassion without control becomes collapse. Sovereignty without enforcement becomes fiction.
Mpumalanga’s borders are not merely provincial lines, they are the frontline of South Africa’s constitutional order. If we continue to tolerate dysfunction at these gateways, we will continue to pay for it in our clinics, classrooms, and communities.
ActionSA believes that South Africa can be humane and lawful. But it begins with a simple truth: borders must mean something, institutions must act, and citizens must no longer be expected to carry the cost of state failure in silence.
Beyond Law Enforcement: Why Border Security Is Everyone’s Responsibility
Every festive season, Mpumalanga becomes a gateway. Not only for holidaymakers and returning families, but for a growing number of undocumented foreign nationals entering South Africa illegally through porous borders.
While government issues routine assurances about “heightened security”, communities on the ground experience a different reality: overwhelmed clinics, overcrowded schools, strained housing, and law enforcement stretched beyond capacity.
ActionSA is deeply concerned by the scale of illegal border crossings into Mpumalanga, particularly during peak travel periods. This is not a theoretical policy debate, it is a lived crisis in towns and villages across the province. It speaks directly to the erosion of border control, the weakening of the rule of law, and the failure of intergovernmental coordination between Home Affairs, SAPS, Defence, and provincial authorities.
There is also a dangerous misconception that illegal foreigners primarily enter South Africa through official ports of entry. This is simply not true. Foreign nationals who pass through border posts such as Lebombo do so legally. They present documentation, are processed, and are granted lawful entry for a stipulated period. It is only when some overstay beyond that timeframe that they become undocumented. Those who enter illegally do so elsewhere, through unguarded stretches of the border, informal crossings, and routes well known to syndicates and smugglers. Conflating these realities distorts public understanding and shifts blame away from the state’s failure to secure the border itself.
Border security is not optional in a constitutional democracy. A state that cannot account for who enters and remains within its territory cannot plan, govern, or protect its citizens effectively. Yet year after year, South Africans are asked to accept dysfunction as inevitability.
Law enforcement alone cannot defeat this crisis. But law enforcement, supported by functioning institutions and an active, responsive citizenry, can make a decisive difference.
Public institutions, particularly in health, education, and social services, cannot remain passive observers. When undocumented individuals arrive at clinics, schools, or municipal offices seeking assistance, these institutions also carry a responsibility to uphold the law. Reporting unlawful presence to the relevant authorities is not cruelty; it is governance. It is how a state maintains order while still acting humanely.
Silence and inaction place an unfair burden on already thin resources. Every unrecorded patient, unaccounted learner, and unmonitored settlement stretches systems that are already failing South Africans. Communities end up competing for services that were never designed to absorb unlimited demand, breeding resentment, instability, and social fracture.
This is not a call for vigilantism or hostility. It is a call for responsibility.
South Africans must work together to curb the scourge of illegal immigration within our borders. A functioning state depends not only on police and soldiers, but on institutions that act lawfully and citizens who understand that order is a shared obligation. Reporting unlawful presence to the appropriate authorities is part of that civic duty.
A country governed by laws cannot selectively enforce them. Compassion without control becomes collapse. Sovereignty without enforcement becomes fiction.
Mpumalanga’s borders are not merely provincial lines, they are the frontline of South Africa’s constitutional order. If we continue to tolerate dysfunction at these gateways, we will continue to pay for it in our clinics, classrooms, and communities.
ActionSA believes that South Africa can be humane and lawful. But it begins with a simple truth: borders must mean something, institutions must act, and citizens must no longer be expected to carry the cost of state failure in silence.