Durban — A Home Affairs official who had been operating with a foreign national syndicate issuing fraudulent passports with the help of South Africans was sentenced to 12 years behind bars in the Durban Magistrate’s Court on Thursday.
Judy Zuma, 47, pleaded guilty to a string of counts including corruption, fraud, and breaching the Immigration Act and the Identification Act.
Her arrest came after a sting operation where she tried to bribe a Home Affairs Counter Corruption Investigator with R10 000.
The National Hawks Anti-Corruption Unit investigated the case.
During 2021, Zuma and the syndicate colluded with South Africans to assist foreign nationals from Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Democratic Republic of Congo to obtain South African passports by using their identity documents and biometrics.
The foreign nationals fraudulently replaced the owner’s photo with theirs and assumed their identity as South African citizens.
Zuma charged R4 000 per passport and issued 192, making well over R700 000.
Her version is that she had first declined when two co-workers asked her to help process the fraudulent documents despite an assurance that once the documents had been processed, an IT specialist would delete the evidence.
After recruitment efforts into the scheme, she caved in. She made R4 000 over several weekends between May 28, 2021, and June 12, 2021, when she and her co-conspirators met at the Dr A B Xuma Street Home Affairs, formerly Commercial Road, where the passports were issued.
In mitigation of sentence, Zuma’s defence, Ben Dlamini, argued that his client was remorseful, and this was evident in her pleading guilty.
He said she had already suffered punishment by losing her job and asked the court to show leniency in sentencing since Zuma was not the leader of the syndicate.
Senior State advocate Abbey Letsholo argued that a lengthy term of imprisonment would be appropriate, adding that she was on the payroll of the department and part of her duties was to protect the integrity of passports in this country.
In sentencing, Magistrate Garth Davis said the offences that Zuma committed were serious, and went on to describe her moral blameworthiness as reprehensible.
He said that she conducted herself in a manner that brought the department into disrepute when she was hired to uphold and protect the integrity of the population register.
“The level of deceit motivated by greed is disturbing, she involved herself in a scheme for her own enrichment to the detriment of their employer and to the integrity of not only the value of a South African passport but to the population register is acute,” said Davis.
He said while Zuma might not have been the syndicate leader, she played an important and corrupt role that was in direct conflict with her employment contract.
“A worryingly uncontroversial conclusion is that corruption and fraud seem to be endemic within the department, the capture of the offices seems almost complete. Many officials from senior managers to the outsourced security companies are complicit or turning a blind eye to what is happening.”
Speaking outside court, Provincial Home Affairs manager Cyril Mncwabe said he hoped that the sentence would serve as a deterrence to other like-minded department employees.
“Such cases are a problem in the department contaminating the national population register. We are also pleased with the magistrate’s ruling that all the passports they processed be red-flagged and confiscated so that we can cancel them. Having these passports out there is a threat to the country’s security.”
Mncwabe said while there was corruption in the department, he believed it had not reached a level where the word “captured” could be used.
“There a few rotten potatoes. I think that the magistrate is just more exposed to the cases, hence why he said ‘captured’. I think the level of corruption has decreased over the years.”
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