Let me walk you through what actually happened. The Constitutional Court made a ruling. Scalabrini Centre v Minister of Home Affairs, 7 July 2026. Four sections of the Refugees Act struck down. What those sections did: they let officials exclude asylum seekers on procedural grounds. How you entered. Whether you had a transit visa. Whether you delayed. Before your claim was even heard. The Court said that conflicts with non-refoulement. You cannot turn someone away at the gate without considering whether they will be harmed if sent back. That is the ruling. Technical. Narrow. Grounded in law South Africa has had since 1998. Now, here is what happened next. Someone took that ruling and made it sound like something else. AI-generated images of Helen Zille and Leon Schreiber "welcoming asylum seekers." Claims that the judgment grants citizenship. Claims that it legalises all foreign nationals. None of it is true. But it does not need to be true. It needs to travel. And it did. The Department of Home Affairs issued a statement today. Real. Not fake. They say they fought the case. They lost. They are implementing a binding Constitutional Court order. They are also referring what they call a coordinated disinformation campaign to the IEC. Here is the thing. This is happening about a month before local elections. The IEC has a new Code of Conduct on Countering Disinformation. Home Affairs is using it. Whether it works is a separate question. But think about the incentive structure. A Constitutional Court ruling on refugee rights is nuanced. It does not fit in a WhatsApp forward. It does not fit on a meme. But "Court forces government to give foreigners citizenship" fits everywhere. The person who created those AI images knows exactly what they are doing. They do not need you to believe it. They need you to share it. And the Department's response, a formal statement, a referral to the IEC, is correct. It is also slow. By the time the correction arrives, the damage is done. There is a deeper layer here. The Scalabrini Centre judgment is about procedural fairness. It says: before you exclude someone, hear their claim. That is not controversial in law. It is, however, explosive in politics. Because the anxiety is real. Unemployment. Service delivery pressure. Competition for resources. The Constitutional Court did not create that anxiety. But a well-timed piece of disinformation can aim it at a target. Foreign nationals are an easier target than a Court judgment. The uncomfortable truth. This is not the first time a technical ruling has been weaponised. It will not be the last. Home Affairs can refer a disinformation campaign to the IEC. They cannot refer a Constitutional Court judgment back to the Court for being politically inconvenient. The question is not whether the disinformation will stop. It is whether voters will hear the correction before they cast their vote.