JOHANNESBURG – South African authorities have confiscated over 5,000 fraudulently-acquired passports from Zimbabweans, sources revealed this week.
In December last year, the neighbouring country’s Home Affairs ministry launched a crackdown on foreigners using fraudulently-acquired South African travelling documents.
A large number of Zimbabweans who have lived in the neighbouring country for more than five years, especially those from Matabeleland, use South African national registration documents and passports, which were fraudulently obtained by either misrepresenting facts with the assistance of some locals, or paying officials at the Home Affairs offices. Because of this, the operation targeted mainly Beitbridge border post.
While the government has officially been silent on how many documents have been seized since the ongoing operation began, sources within the Home Affairs department told ***The Zimbabwean early this week that the number had exceeded 5,000 as of last Friday.
“The greatest rate was recorded at the beginning of the year, by January 10, we had over 3,000 seized documents. We are still confiscating more documents and there are chances that the number could be quite big when the operation finally ends, which could be a few weeks before the June soccer World Cup,” said the source.
The official revealed that after their documents were seized, the Zimbabweans were given forms advising them to re-apply for them in the country’s capital city of Pretoria.
“So far, very few people have come forward to re-apply or contest the seizure, and that shows us that we are dealing with the real target in this drive. I am sure these people are scared that they will be caught during the screening process that comes with re-applying,” the official said.
She added that on re-applying, the document holders are required to bring their birth registration cards, school records, parents’ birth or death certificates, affidavits stamped by police to confirm that they are truly South Africans and a letter from their local chief, confirming that they were born in the areas they claim they were born.
Most Zimbabweans are seemingly failing to produce that proof, forcing them to live without such documents. The official did not immediately reveal what would legally happen to those that did not go to the Pretoria offices. She could only say that their documents would be cancelled and they would be certified as illegal immigrants.
The smaller formation of the MDC, led by Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, is currently involved in talks with the South African authorities, in a bid to secure amnesty for the affected Zimbabweans.
So far, the South Africans are said to be willing to grant conditional amnesty and only to those Zimbabweans who arrived in the 1990s, but the MDC is negotiating for a blanket amnesty for all.

By The Zimbabwean