SA’s refugee offices rife with bribes, says report

ALMOST a third of the people who have to deal with SA’s refugee reception offices have been asked for bribes, a new report suggests.

It details the extent of corruption in the refugee-and asylum-seeking process and concludes that corruption in this area is "very serious".

The report, to be released on Wednesday by Lawyers for Human Rights and the African Centre for Migration and Society, also concluded that this state of affairs was the result of a "deliberate government choice" — to avoid addressing the fundamental issues in the system.

However, the Department of Home Affairs said it was serious about combating corruption and addressing the underlying issues.

Spokesman Mayihlome Tshwete said the European Union (EU) spoke of a migration crisis when dealing with 90,000 to 100,000 migrants. SA, a single country with fewer resources than the EU, had 72,000 asylum seekers last year. "The context is very important," he said.

The report said that of almost a thousand refugees and asylum seekers who were approached outside refugee reception offices across the country, one in five said they had been asked for money in order to get their issue resolved.

At the Marabastad office in Pretoria, the percentage jumped significantly to 47%, with 30% of asylum seekers saying they had been unable to get into the office just because they were unwilling to pay.

One of the people surveyed at Marabastad said: "They asked for money outside and they share with the security guard. Inside we are called to a room. They call one of us who must ask for R200 from the others and then by the time you collect the permit, the official has already gotten the money." The report also highlighted the link between inefficiency and corruption, saying that as inefficiencies in the system increased, so did Continued on page 2Graft hotspots: page 3 opportunities for corruption. The long queues and delays had been worsened by the highly contested decision to close the Johannesburg, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth offices.

The report said that, while the application process under the Refugees Act is supposed to be finished within 180 days, 47% of the people surveyed had been in the system for more than a year.

Half of them said that they had to go back to the refugee reception office to address a single issue.

The report said the Home Affairs counter-corruption unit was "largely reactive", responding to individual complaints rather than conducting broader investigations. This meant that the "structural problem" remained, even if corrupt individuals were rooted out.

But Mr Tshwete said that criticism was "disingenuous" as the department had rooted out syndicates, not just individuals. The unit functioned at deputy director-general level and was "by its nature, strategic". It did investigations, he said.

The report said that while SA’s refugee legal framework was progressive, the department had failed to respond to the high level of demand that "quickly exceeded capacity".

Instead of focusing on increasing capacity, the government focused on decreasing demand, which has only worsened the problem.

The government has lamented the fact that many applications for asylum and refugee status actually come from economic migrants seeking to avoid the more stringent immigration laws.

Mr Tshwete said there needed to be two responses; one at a policy level — to distinguish between genuine asylum seekers and economic migrants — and the other at an operational level to root out corruption.