Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi says his department is clamping down on corruption and is arresting people on “a weekly basis” for flouting the country’s laws.<\/p>\n
The minister said in a recent interview with ENCA<\/a>, that most government departments are tackling corruption on the basis of supply chain and procurement. However, he said that with home affairs, “temptation is everywhere”.<\/p>\n “Some have been tempted,” he said of employees within the department. “But we are fortunate that the extraordinary majority of workers have not been tempted. That is how we could isolate and arrest these people.”<\/p>\n Business Day<\/a> reported that an estimated 45,000 fraudulent visas were issued by the Department of Home Affairs between 2014 and June 2021. Cassius Lubisi, chair of a review panel appointed by home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi, told MPs in parliament that officials had created fake users on the system to issue fraudulent documents and bypassed controls to manipulate visa and permit applications.<\/p>\n Lubisi said that on average, 23% of all study visa approvals between 2014 and 2021 were for Zimbabwean nationals, which were done through a normal study visa, News24<\/a> reported.<\/p>\n “Likewise, 11% of all approvals were from Nigeria, and 10% were from Congo. The three mentioned countries thus contribute to 44% of all study visa approvals by foreign nationals for the period.” Some study visas were finalised in one day.<\/p>\n Motsoaledi said that the government will increasingly seek to bring corrupt individuals before the courts. He pointed to the recent bust where two home affairs officials were arrested for processing over 100 documents for foreign nationals for a R1,000 fee. Four other officials were suspended.<\/p>\n Officials in the Germiston branch were also brought to book for illegally processing passports for foreign nationals – while officials in the Tzaneen officer are also facing disciplinary hearings for the same offense.<\/p>\n The damage caused by these fraudulent activities is not only affecting South Africa’s reputation globally, but also all South African passport holders, the minister said.<\/p>\n He used the example of the recent RyanAir controversy, which saw the airline quizzing local passport holders – in Afrikaans – testing their knowledge of local facts to determine if they were South African citizens.<\/p>\n “They are asking these questions because they don’t trust the passport you have. It affects everyone,” Motsoaledi said.<\/p>\n The minister relayed another case where the South African ambassador to Portugal was called up by the Portuguese government to deal with a South African caught peddling drugs.<\/p>\n “When our ambassador checked, she found that gentleman was from Gabon. But he’s holding a passport in the name of South Africa. This is something that is very terrible, that we cannot allow.”<\/p>\n While Motsoaledi’s comments speak to wider perceptions on local passports, investigations from AfricaCheck in May 2022 found that countries had no special view or processes<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0in place for South African passport holders.<\/p>\n The minister said that his department is taking additional measures to fight fraud and corruption including moving away from the Home Affairs National Identification System (HANIS) database to the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which adds more biometric identity markers – like iris scans and facial recognition – to the database.<\/p>\n The migration to the ABIS system began in 2016, and Motsoaledi said that 99% of South Africans on the National Registry have already been entered into the system. This, he said, will prevent some of the known measures fraudsters take to obtain fake passports.<\/p>\n Previously, foreign nationals with fake passports would use the biometrics (fingerprint) of a South African, and their own photo to get past checks. With the new system, the added biometrics require the fingerprint, iris scan and facial features to align.<\/p>\n
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