South African court to rule on whether Chidimma Adetshina should stay in detention
The Cape Town Regional Court is due to decide on Wednesday whether Nigerian pageant queen Chidimma Adetshina should remain in detention while deportation pro...
The Cape Town Regional Court is due to decide on Wednesday whether Nigerian pageant queen Chidimma Adetshina should remain in detention while deportation proceedings move ahead. The ruling comes after her arrest in June for allegedly entering South Africa illegally through the Lebombo border from Mozambique, even though authorities had already declared her a prohibited person.
Adetshina, a former Miss South Africa contestant, has been at the centre of a long-running immigration fight that started well before this week’s court hearing. Her identity and travel documents were cancelled in October 2024 after allegations that her mother fraudulently registered her birth to a South African woman. That dispute pushed the case from the pageant stage into the legal system.
Dispute over the ban
Her legal team says the Department of Home Affairs has already accepted that Adetshina was never involved in the alleged birth-registration fraud. But the department still treated her as a prohibited person after a fraudulent bank statement was allegedly included in a visa application while she was living in Nigeria.
Her lawyers argue the paperwork came from an immigration agency that handled the visa process. Small detail. Big consequences.
That distinction now matters. If the court decides she should be detained, the authorities could keep her in custody while the deportation matter is pursued. If not, the case will likely continue with her outside detention, but still under the shadow of a possible removal from the country.
A case watched beyond South Africa
The hearing has drawn attention well outside South Africa because it sits at the intersection of immigration enforcement, identity disputes and a public pageant career that once made Adetshina a familiar name in the country’s entertainment press. It also lands at a time when courts in several countries are being asked to weigh whether people should be held while broader legal challenges play out.
The Department of Home Affairs’ lawyer revealed at the last hearing that the state’s position remained tied to the alleged visa irregularity, not the birth-registration fraud allegations that initially clouded her status. That left the court with a narrower question for Wednesday: detention first, deportation later, or not at all.
The Cape Town courtroom is expected to hand down the judgment on Wednesday. Whatever the outcome, the case turns on the same disputed papers that have followed Adetshina since her 2024 document cancellation — and on the question of whether those documents are enough to keep her behind bars pending removal.
