Two former Home Affairs officials arrested over passports sold to foreign nationals for up to R100 000
The pair were arrested in Germiston and charged with corruption, fraud and contravening the Immigration Act, in a case the department's own counter-corruption unit and the Hawks opened in 2022.
Two former Home Affairs officials have been arrested in Germiston over allegations that they helped foreign nationals obtain South African passports through a fraudulent “photo-swapping” scheme, with passports allegedly sold for up to R100 000 each.
The arrests follow a joint investigation by the department’s Counter Corruption Unit and the Hawks, which uncovered the syndicate in 2022. As IOL reported on 13 October, the two former officials are alleged to have exploited weaknesses in an outdated manual process to issue the passports.
The method is the part that matters to any South African holding an ID. Investigators say the syndicate used the identity details of legitimate South African citizens to obtain passports that carried the photographs of foreign nationals. In plain terms, a real citizen’s name and identity number were used to produce a genuine South African passport bearing somebody else’s face.
Mosa Chabane, who chairs Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs, said the arrest was made in Germiston and that the two face charges of corruption, fraud and contravention of Section 49(5) of the Immigration Act.
“The arrest and prosecution of rogue Home Affairs officials is critical to safeguarding the country’s population register,” Chabane said. “We cannot continue to have civil servants fraudulently facilitating the sale of South African identity documents, particularly given the significant security risks such actions pose to the country.”
He said criminal proceedings should run alongside internal disciplinary processes so that implicated officials are dealt with and, where warranted, removed from the public service. He warned that leaving officials suspected of compromising the population register in positions of responsibility could expose the department to further risk.
The National Population Register is the state’s record of who is a South African citizen and who is lawfully resident here. A passport built on a swapped photograph does not only defraud the department. It attaches a citizen’s identity to a person the citizen has never met, and it turns a document other countries accept at face value into a security and immigration risk.
Chabane used the arrests to repeat the committee’s long-standing call for more funding for the Counter Corruption and Security Services branch inside Home Affairs. “A key security department such as the home affairs cannot afford vulnerabilities, particularly those linked to its own personnel,” he said. “Additional funding must be made available to strengthen the branch and enhance its investigative capacity.”
He linked the case to the Lubisi Report, the independent investigation commissioned in 2021 by then Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi into allegations of large-scale fraud in the issuing of visas, permits and citizenship documents. Chabane said the recommendations of that report, and those arising from later Special Investigating Unit work, must be fully implemented.
Home Affairs spokesperson Carli van Wyk said the case is a demonstration of why the department is digitising. Under the reforms, she said, biometric verification now links applicants to their identities throughout the application process, including at the point where photographs are captured, which closes the loophole that allowed a foreign national’s photograph to be substituted for a South African citizen’s.
“The same approach underpins the department’s digital partnership with banks, which is expanding access to smart ID cards through secure, digitally integrated processes,” the department said.
Van Wyk said automating identity verification and reducing human discretion is systematically removing opportunities for corruption across the department’s systems.
Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said outdated manual processes had for years created loopholes that criminal syndicates could exploit. “Through our digital transformation, we are closing these loopholes by introducing secure biometric verification and automated systems that remove opportunities for human manipulation,” he said. “Our reforms are not simply about making Home Affairs faster and more convenient. They are about fundamentally changing how the department operates so that fraud and corruption are prevented by design, rather than detected only after the damage has been done.”
The department says 98 Home Affairs officials have been dismissed and 42 arrested since the start of the seventh administration as part of its crackdown on corruption. Schreiber commended the Counter Corruption Unit and the Hawks.
The two former officials now face the criminal process. No trial date has been set in the material available, and the department has not said what internal steps, if any, are running against them.
