Speech delivered by Minister Leon Schreiber at the University of Johannesburg’s Combatting Corruption Summit
05 September 2025
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a pleasure to join you this morning in reflecting on the major inroads that Home Affairs is making in the fight against corruption.
While we still have a long way to go, I am here this morning to report that – a little over one year into the five-year term of the Government of National Unity – Home Affairs is beginning to win the fight against corruption.
That I am able to make this statement today without being laughed out of the room like I would have been a year ago, serves to demonstrate both how deeply associated with corruption Home Affairs had been for far too long, and how much progress we are now making.
As we reflect on that progress, and on the lessons it holds, we have to start by not beating around the bush.
The Department of Home Affairs was a ground zero site for the grand corruption project known as State Capture.
It is in this Department where the Guptaleaks exposed how Gupta family members who did not qualify in terms of the law were granted citizenship.
Over the years, that level of impunity cascaded throughout the administration, as Home Affairs sadly became synonymous not only with long queues and poor service delivery, but also with corruption.
And it was not limited only to Home Affairs.
Once the message went out from the very top of government that public services could be treated as personal fiefdoms to enrich politicians and their friends, the floodgates opened.
As a result, syndicates took hold wherever value could be extracted.
Wholly abnormal concepts, such as “construction mafias” and “water tanker mafias” have become normalised in our society.
This pattern of syndicated behaviour, where people inside government conspire with tenderpreneurs masquerading as private businesses, is visible throughout the state.
During the launch of the Border and Immigration Anti-Corruption Forum earlier this year, I warned that South Africa is increasingly becoming a syndicate society.
I repeat that warning to this esteemed gathering today.
As South Africa increasingly morphed into a syndicate society, Home Affairs was not spared.
Syndicates formed wherever services of value had to be rendered.
From visas to the green bar-coded ID book, weaknesses in the system of document issuance were engineered and exploited, enabling syndicates to extract bribes in order to issue documents to people who were not entitled to it.
Whether it was a Minister irregularly issuing a naturalisation certificate to a Gupta family member who was not entitled to it, or an official issuing an ID book to someone who did not qualify for it, corruption had become an accepted norm that infected the system and culture, from top to bottom.
But now, under the GNU, a very different message is going out.
It was not by accident that one of my first acts as Minister was to revoke the citizenship of Gupta family members.
Now, the message is the polar opposite: not only do we condemn corruption in all its forms, but we will not hesitate to act to right the wrongs of our corrupt past.
Individual accountability is the first building block of our approach to washing the stain of corruption and State Capture from not only the Department of Home Affairs, but the entire ecosystem that includes the Border Management Authority (BMA) and the Government Printing Works (GPW).
Through holding accountable people involved in corruption both inside and outside the Department, we are dismantling the syndicates that took hold over many years.
A key part of our success is the partnership that involves a team of forensic experts led by former Director-General in the Presidency, Dr Cassius Lubisi, who have used big data analytics to pinpoint officials involved in visa fraud, as well as the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and law enforcement partners.
This partnership culminated in the formalisation of the Border and Immigration Anti-Corruption Forum earlier this year.
This collaborative approach ensures impartiality and objectivity, eliminating the potential for internal biases or cover-ups that have plagued such proceedings in the past.
Thanks to our commitment to enforcing individual accountability, and this collaborative approach, we have so far dismissed a total of 54 officials from the Department of Home Affairs and the BMA between July 2024 and August 2025 for offenses including fraud, corruption, and misconduct.
This is a strong start, but we are far from done.
We will not stop until we have purged each and every official who abuses their position for personal gain.
Even more significantly, eight of these individuals have already been convicted and sentenced to prison terms of up to 18 years each, sending a clear message that there will be no impunity for those who betray the public trust.
Another 40 disciplinary cases, including 31 from the Department and nine from GPW, will be concluded in the coming months in terms of due process.
A further 15 criminal cases against former Home Affairs and BMA officials are currently under investigation by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and we will continue to work with law enforcement to ensure they join their former colleagues behind bars.
Importantly, this includes private citizens who conspire with officials to form corrupt syndicates.
I also want to highlight a systemic breakthrough that this forum delivered in the form of a landmark and precedent-setting ruling from the Labour Court, which now allows external chairpersons to preside over disciplinary hearings.
I urge all government departments to use this precedent, created by Home Affairs, to mitigate the risk of internal cover-ups.
But enforcing accountability is only one part of the equation.
The other pillar of our anti-corruption campaign is often neglected in public discourse, even though it is arguably even more important to preventing recurrences of corruption.
Beyond firing and imprisoning corrupt officials, the Home Affairs ecosystem is guided, in all that we do, by our commitment to systemic reform – largely, but not exclusively, based on digital transformation.
If we think that our job as political leaders is merely to catch and discipline wayward officials and other members of corrupt syndicates, then we will fall far short.
Our aim should not only be to punish corruption – it must be to prevent it from occurring in the first place.
This means that when an act of malfeasance is uncovered, it is not enough to ask: “who did it?”
An even more important question is: “how did they do it?”
Allow me to give you a practical example.
Shortly after I assumed office in July last year, a group of 95 Libyan nationals were discovered at what appeared to be a security training camp in Mpumalanga.
The media focused on this case as the implicated individuals were arrested and deported.
But the real question in this case related to how they got into the country in the first place.
Long after the media attention went away, we continued to work on this question, as I was determined to understand what kind of system could possibly have allowed this to happen.
I soon got my answer: the Libyan nationals were issued with study visas they were not entitled to by an official employed by the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, stationed at the South African mission in Tunis.
But, for me, the real scandal was that these visas were nothing more than hand- written pieces of paper.
How was it possible that in the year 2024, in the age of Artificial Intelligence and self-driving cars, the most developed country on the African continent still used pens and pieces of paper that can be obviously manipulated, to grant access to our country?
How neglectful and disinterested in serious reform must a country be to allow such a situation to persist for decades on end?
This incident only served to reinforce our determination to fully digitalise and automate South Africa’s visa system.
The Libyan case made it clear that outdated, manual, paper-based processes provided the opening that syndicates used to illegally issue visas.
Just a year later, this reality will change fundamentally when we shortly begin to roll out the world-class new Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) system that we built.
It will use the same principles successfully used by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) to completely automate not only the application process, but also the adjudication process for visas.
Applicants will need to apply online, scan their passport, take a selfie, and provide other required information.
Through machine learning technology, the ETA will check forty different features of their passport to ensure it is authentic, it will match their selfie to the photo on their passport, and when they arrive at a port of entry, a camera will confirm that the face of the traveller who arrived is the same as the one who applied.
This will eliminate the scope for human interference, bias and corruption.
In the first phase, we will roll out the ETA for simpler applications like tourist visas shorter than 90 days.
But, over time, our ambition is to roll it out for every visa category.
If this system had been in place when those 95 Libyans hatched their plans, they would never have gotten a visa even if they had found a crooked official – because that official would no longer have had the discretion to implement corrupt decisions.
We are following this exact approach across this ecosystem.
I am proud to be able to announce today that we have just begun implementing a similar technological upgrade that will lead to major improvements to the security of the South African passport.
Just like we wanted to understand the systemic causes of visa fraud, we also zoomed in on how it was possible for syndicates to target passport applications.
What we found is that, previously, biometric verification of the client was done at the start of the application process.
But when it came to the photo that would be captured in the passport, there was no biometric verification.
Once again, it was through this systemic weakness that space was created for those with corrupt intent.
So, we closed it.
In the past few weeks, we started rolling out an upgrade to our live capture system that does a biometric check on the photo that goes into the passport.
If the face on that photo does not match the face we have on record in the Population Register, the application is declined and the passport is not produced.
This systemic reform, again built around digital transformation, has laid the first step towards enhancing the power of our passport so that we can eventually negotiate visa-free access to more countries.
A final example – and perhaps the most powerful of all – is our work to enhance access to Smart IDs so that we can end the use of the Green ID book.
In another unbelievable moment after assuming office, I found that there are still 18 million Green IDs in use in South Africa, nearly a decade-and-a-half after the vastly more secure Smart ID was introduced.
Research has found that the Green ID is the most defrauded document on the African continent.
It is costing our financial sector dearly, and it sits at the heart of most cases of identity theft – for the simple reason that it uses manual photos that can be easily manipulated.
Again, there was an obvious follow-up question that has seemingly gone unasked for many years: why were so many people still using the Green ID?
The answer is that Home Affairs had not expanded access to ensure that everyone has access to the Smart ID.
As we speak, there are still 101 out of the total 349 permanent Home Affairs offices that are not modernised, which means that you cannot get a Smart ID there.
Residents served by these offices are thus forces to still get the Green ID book despite the risk it poses.
This was an Orwellian situation, where the government recognised the need to replace the Green ID with the Smart ID, but failed to implement the systemic reforms required to expand access and inclusion.
Again, using technology, we are changing this.
The solution clearly lay in reforming, modernising and massively expanding the existing partnership between Home Affairs and the banking sector, which dates back to 2016 and has seen the provision of Smart ID and Passport services in 30 bank branches.
But this footprint is far too small and concentrated in urban areas.
So, I asked: what is standing in the way of scaling this up across the country?
Again, the answer lay in technology.
Despite the fact that all the banks were already integrated with Home Affairs through our Online Verification Service, which verifies identities when people open bank accounts or do certain other transactions, the previous model saw Home Affairs installing its own camera, fingerprint scanner and officials in bank branches.
This was despite the fact that Home Affairs was too underfunded to ever meaningfully scale up the project, and despite the fact that the banks already had all the infrastructure, and were already securely connected to Home Affairs through the OVS.
With Cabinet having set us the target to expand this service to 1 000 bank branches under the Medium-Term Development Plan, we got to work on fixing and upgrading the OVS, which had been under-priced and also neglected for many years.
As a result, over 50% of attempts to verify someone’s identity, failed.
We fixed that, with the OVS failure rate reduced to below 1% and now returning verifications in less than a second.
This alone is a major improvement for national security, as banks now have a reliable system to verify the identities of their clients.
Once the OVS upgrade was complete, we corrected the fee structure to ensure we could maintain it into the future.
With a secure backbone in place, we have just concluded updated agreements with eight different banks to move from the previous manual to a new digital partnership model.
As a result, from October, many more bank branches across South Africa will begin to offer biometrically-secured Smart ID and Passport services.
Based on the commitments we have already received, we are likely to have hundreds of branches online within the next twelve months, with a specific focus on rural and underserved areas.
Additionally, the same technology used in branches is used on digital banking apps, which means that you will soon be able to apply for your Smart ID or Passport online – and eventually have it delivered to your doorstep.
This is what we mean with our vision to deliver “Home Affairs @ home” and it is bringing about a service delivery revolution.
In addition to being a game-changing pro-poor and pro-inclusion reform that will dramatically cut queues and travel times for the most vulnerable members of our society, this expansion in access through technology will also enable us to finally end the status of the Green ID book as a legal form of identification, thereby eliminating one of the greatest sources of fraud in Africa.
We are following the same blueprint to deal with bribery and corruption in the border environment.
Once again, it is only possible to bribe an official to gain entry to South Africa if that official has the discretionary power to make such a decision.
The BMA’s plan to automate entry-and-exit at these ports of entry to eliminate the space for corruption is signed-off and ready to go.
However, the long-standing crisis of underfunding at the BMA has become acute, and we will not be able to secure the border environment until that is resolved.
The good news is that funding the BMA is, without any doubt, the single best investment that we can make as a country right now.
By implementing the vision for a digitally transformed border environment, we will clamp down on illicit trade and migration, increase tax revenue, and reduce the burden on law enforcement in the country.
It is an investment that will literally pay for itself, and we must all continue to advocate for an urgent resolution to the funding shortfall at the BMA, especially given the demands from society that politicians must take urgent action on illegal immigration.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Combining a ruthless focus on accountability with a determination to reform the Home Affairs ecosystem from the ground up, is the reason why we are starting to win the fight against corruption in this sector.
I repeat that this fight is far from over, and we still have a long way to go.
But the commitment to punishing wayward officials without fear or favour, combined with recognition of the many hardworking staff members who go out of their way to serve the public under very difficult circumstances, is starting to change our internal culture.
Instead of dishing out citizenship to the Guptas, we are dishing out consequences for criminals.
At the same time, we understand that our responsibility goes further than that.
Under the GNU, we are moving with urgency to use technology to systematically close the loopholes that syndicates use to commit acts of corruption in the first place.
To turn this aim into reality requires, leadership, vision, attention to detail, and an unwavering commitment to systemic reform.
The job of political leaders is not only to be seen to be doing something about the symptoms of problems.
It is to actually do something about the systemic causes.
In turn, the job of the public is to galvanise behind, and protect, anti-corruption efforts against those who would want to prevent reform and preserve the syndicates that threaten the future of our country.
Our ultimate collective goal – for Home Affairs but also for the whole of South Africa – should be to empower genuine reformers who can build systems that become impenetrable.
So that the next time a criminal syndicate attempts to capture our state, they run into a brick wall deliberately constructed to not only undo the effect of State Capture – but to prevent it from happening ever again.
Thank you.
Media Enquiries:
Duwayne Esau – Spokesperson for the Minister, Cell number: 077 606 9702
ISSUED BY THE MINISTRY OF HOME AFFAIRS