SA fraud-busting director general retires in April
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
The South African Embassy in Budapest and others, worldwide, are sad to see South Africa’s fraud-busting Department of Home Affairs Director General, Mavuso Msimang, retire in April this year.
They claim they have had some of the smoothest and best years of administration since democratic changes took place in 1994. The Embassy of the Republic of South African opened its gates in Budapest on Nov 10, 1991.
Before his appointment in 2007 Msimang managed the State Information Technology Agency. Prior to that he was chief executive of South African National Parks after a stint as the first black executive director of the South African Tourism Board.
The 68-year-old black leader, who speaks eloquent English, has been dubbed “Mr. Fix It” by all who have come in contact with him in the Rainbow Nation. He is famous for a R800-mil turn-around of South Africa’s once most despised, bureaucratic and corrupt government department.
He believe that the battle against corruption in South Africa has a long way to go yet, but added, “But this battle can be won.”
He explains that during his international travels he was fed up encountering illegal foreigners with fake documents pretending to be south African citizens when they weren’t. “I’m passionate about protecting the South African identity,” he said. He had been in exile as an ANC activist for much too long (30 years) during the Apartheid era.
One of the reasons he took the post of director general of Home Affairs was due to his slow and perilous experience when trying to retrieve a copy of his wedding certificate.
Once ID documents took nearly 250 days to process during Msimang’s tenure this was reduced to an average 44 days, while the department issues temporary IDs on the spot. “That was done via introducing online verification of fingerprints in 2008,” he explains. While a single ID application once passed through 80 hands now only 15 hands are needed for the job. Passports once required 53 days if the applicant was lucky, today it requires less than a month.
He complained that a lot more needed to be done and spent on IT developments for Home Affairs to be really ‘consumer’ friendly as he would like it as this would cost the state a lot more to further develop the department’s IT.
He is indirectly responsible for the firing of 400 corrupt Home Affairs staff members. But even so the government has both hands full when fighting against what he calls “serious syndicates” who pay handsomely for doctored South African documents. Sometimes a doctored South African passport could fetch as much as R75,000. This is one of the reasons why South Africans have to stand in separate long queues at Heathrow Airport as the UK has imposed more stringent visa requirements against them.
