ANN7 owner Mzwanele Manyi is lashing out over the department of home affairs inspecting the work permits of Indian staffers and on Tuesday evening decided to vent on ANN7, saying home affairs should visit Chinese firms that "for a fact" have lots of unlawful workers, that home affairs will find "lots of them" in Bedfordview, and that "they can go to the townships – there’s all kinds of Pakistani's that are there without the required documentation".
The department
of home affairs on Tuesday conducted a second surprise raid at the Gupta-linked
ANN7 to inspect the documents of the 18 Indian staffers working at the ANN7
headquarters in Midrand.
Three Indian
staffers who are not senior managers, were detained but not arrested, and allowed
to return to work after questioning.
Mzwanele Manyi,
chairperson of Afrotone Media Holdings that owns ANN7 (DStv 405) and The
New Age took to the ANN7 airwaves on Tuesday evening at 19:00 to vent
about the behaviour and actions of the department of home affairs.
Mzwanele Manyi
said there's been a "communications breakdown" between ANN7 and the
department of home affairs, saying "we're on that process to go and drop
off the documents so that they can inspect. And the arrangement was that by
Thursday we'll drop off the documents there. So we were sitting here with that
understanding that we are dropping off the documents on Thursday".
Mzwanele Manyi
said "we have nothing to hide as an organisation" and "that is
nobody at these premises who are here unlawfully". He said on ANN7
"the visas are no problem. The problem is the, shall I call it, the
categorisation of the work permit. That is the whole issue, and it maybe
affects two or three employees. The rest of the employees have got proper work
permits."
"There's
probably one or two – three at most – who are on intra [company visa], but even
those, they are not here unlawfully. They are here lawfully".
Mzwanele Manyi
said the Indian staffers "are highly traumatised".
"The
treatment, the arrangement, that we were exposed to here today, I must say as a
South African I was ashamed of my country because what they did, it reminded me
of the pass law raid and whatever."
"If indeed
there was this seriousness in my view, from home affairs, if there is a seriousness
to weed out unlawful people in the country, surely they should have visited
various Chinese firms in the country – those people indeed, for a fact, they
have a lot of people that are unlawful."
"They
could have gone to Bedfordview [eastern Ekurhuleni], they will find lots of
them. They can come to Sandton here and look at foreign nationals that are not
here legally. They can go to the townships – there’s all kinds of Pakistani's
that are there without the required documentation," said Mzwanele Manyi.
"That's
why this could also, the narrative that says we are being targeted here can
actually be a credible narrative, because there's absolutely no reason for home
affairs to really act in the manner they did when they're getting
co-operation".
ANN7 didn’t respond to a media enquiry made Tuesday evening asking
for comment about the latest home affairs raid.
MultiChoice is dumping ANN7 at the end of August from its DStv
satellite pay-TV platform over repeated compliance breaches, low audience
ratings, a lack of technical and editorial quality, as well as investor
pressure arising from reputational damage over ANN7’s association with the controversial
Gupta family linked to widespread State Capture allegations.
