Soon after self-proclaimed prophet Shepherd Bushiri and his wife skipped the country last year, it emerged that they had help from home affairs officials to obtain illegal travel documents which they had been using to come in and out of the country for years.
We understand from home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi that the officials are known and that further investigations into their conduct is underway.
This week, we reported on another scandal where Magdalene Sandlana, the estranged wife of prominent leader Michael Sandlana of the IPHC church, was declared dead while alive and well.
A death certificate was applied for allegedly by her husband.
While Sandlana is yet to comment on the case of fraud opened by his wife, documents seen by this newspaper to obtain the certificate and to take control of her “deceased” estate appear to bear his name.
The obvious question of course is if it was indeed Sandlana who made the application and if so, how he planned to navigate the truth that his wife is very much alive. These are questions we hope the criminal investigation will shed light on.
Ultimately, these cases are as much about the individuals involved as they are, importantly, about the broader problem of corruption at home affairs and what it means for us as a country.
In the past year, at least 298 cases of fraud have been investigated by the department’s anti-corruption unit, according to home affairs and 56 cases are yet to be concluded.
These are extremely serious crimes that should not be viewed through a tunnel vision of individual impact on those directly involved.
But rather we should ask questions about what this means for the integrity of our national information, population register and even national security.
Motsoaledi would have us believe that the cases currently being investigated and prosecuted are a demonstration of the government’s commitment to deal with corruption.
Perhaps to some degree they are, but they also demonstrate a largely reactive approach to corruption-fighting. What this tells us is that home affairs systems are neither proactive nor vigorous enough to prevent what appears to be a large-scale corruption by its officials.
In a global era where information is power, systemic weaknesses such as these present a new and different kind of danger to our national security which must be tackled with much more sophistication and agility than we currently are witnessing.
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