South Africa: South Africa Did Not Spend R17 Billion On Deportations in Two Years - Error Still Circulating Despite Corrected News Article

What the report says

Africa Check reported on 14 September 2026 that a claim circulating on social media about South Africa spending R17 billion on deportations over two financial years was incorrect. The claim had been linked to a South African Broadcasting Corporation story about a parliamentary reply from Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber, but the figure was later shown to have been misstated.

According to the parliamentary response cited in the article, the department said 111,464 people were deported across 2024/25 and 2025/26, with expenditure of just over R101.7 million in the first year and R73.4 million in the second. That puts the combined total at about R175.1 million, far below R17 billion. The piece says the error appears to have come from misreading the decimal point in the total.

The article notes that the Department of Home Affairs corrected the record soon after the original SABC report was published, and that Schreiber’s party, the Democratic Alliance, also challenged the higher figure in a later statement. SABC has since updated its story and added an editor’s note acknowledging the correction.

The report says the inaccurate number continued to spread on Facebook amid rising anti-migrant sentiment and protests in parts of South Africa. The correction matters because the size of the spending figure changes the public understanding of immigration enforcement costs and has become part of wider debate over migrants, deportations and government accountability.