It’s been an open secret for years that bribing a pliant official will smooth the way to a visa or residence permit for a person ineligible for these precious documents.
Now the Special Investigations Unit has provided hard evidence of the rot in the department of home affairs, adding yet another corruption scandal to the long list stretching back to the arms deal in 1999. It augurs ill for the prospects of clean governance under National Health Insurance (NHI), which will centralise funding and procurement on an unprecedented scale.
We’ve seen MPs bilking parliament for travel expenses, former president Jacob Zuma enabling the Gupta family and its associates to manipulate government contracts for their personal gain, and widespread looting of public funds in inflated contracts awarded by provincial departments. All too often, widely publicised investigations lead to only a handful of convictions and quietly fizzle out with little accountability.
In the latest instance, the SIU has exposed how a swathe of low-ranking officials readily accepted bribes to rubber-stamp visa and permit applications, effectively creating a marketplace in which documents were sold to the highest bidder. The investigation is ongoing, and already the SIU has established that crooked staff racked up more than R16m in bribes for fraudulent visas and has referred 275 people for criminal prosecution.
Many of these allegedly corrupt officials made only cursory attempts to hide what they were doing. In one of the most egregious examples, an official earning just R25,000 a month allegedly routed bribes via her husband’s construction company and used the money to build a palatial home on a scale impossible to reconcile with her government salary.
The SIU’s revelations do little to build faith in the government’s capacity to manage the billions of rand that are expected to flow under NHI, the ANC’s much-vaunted policy for achieving universal health coverage. Under this scheme, the government plans to channel all payments for equipment, medicines and health services through a single government-controlled fund. Its vulnerability to malign actors was repeatedly flagged by stakeholders when the NHI bill was considered by parliament, but to no avail: no substantive changes to the legislation were made to limit the risks of plunder.
The arrest this week of the health department’s director-general, Sandile Buthelezi, and two other senior officials only heightens concern about the security of public funds under NHI. The three men have been charged with fraud and theft for allegedly diverting money from the Global Fund to fight HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria to fund a disciplinary inquiry targeting a whistleblower.
This is not the first time Buthelezi’s name has been associated with alleged corruption: he was suspended and then reinstated in the wake of the Digital Vibes scandal, in which a little-known communications company run by close associates of then-health minister Zweli Mkhize won lucrative contracts. He has been accused of soliciting a bribe from a construction company, and his role in the awarding of a controversial oxygen plant tender has been questioned by the minister of public works and infrastructure.
The ease with which corruption networks infiltrated the department of home affairs is a stark reminder of the state’s vulnerability to capture on a grand scale. A rotten visa regime is bad enough, as it disrupts lives and livelihoods. But as the patients who rely on crumbling public health facilities in corruption-racked Gauteng will attest, malfeasance in public health is infinitely worse, for then the price is paid in lives.
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