Home Affairs minister launches new body to combat corruption at South Africa’s borders

South Africa’s porous borders, plagued by poor infrastructure and enforcement, are notoriously vulnerable to transnational criminal networks, while rampant corruption within the Border Management Authority (BMA) and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) allows these networks to operate with impunity.

A new body, the Border Management and Immigration Anti-Corruption Forum (BMIACF), has been formed to combat this.

On Tuesday, Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber launched the BMIACF in partnership with the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) and the BMA.

Schreiber said the enforcement of accountability and the widespread reform of systems were needed to deal with corruption.

At the event, National Director of Public Prosecutions Shamila Batohi said corruption undermined the foundation of South Africa’s governance structures and posed significant challenges to border management and immigration.

She said the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found that South Africa was an important transit route for organised criminal networks involved in human trafficking, drugs, small arms smuggling and other forms of cross-border crimes.

“Our ability to control and monitor our borders is a key pillar of state security and sovereignty, and when these systems are vulnerable to corruption, the consequences are dire,” said Batohi.

‘They break the system’ 

While transnational crime is often coordinated by sophisticated and well-organised criminal groups, both domestic and international, their activities are enabled by individuals within the DHA and the BMA, groupings that Schreiber dubbed “syndicates”.

“Once we understand that it is the aim of syndicates to not only exploit the system but to merge with it, we also begin to understand that the many failures of service delivery caused by corruption are not accidental. Where syndicates take control, they deliberately break the system,” said Schreiber.

He said the only way to effectively eradicate corruption was by tackling it at its root, enforcing accountability while reforming the system to “close loopholes and weaknesses that criminals exploit”.

Read more: SANDF’s near-impossible task of combating illegal immigration and smuggling on the Limpopo border

Schreiber said the BMIACF sought to take stock of the work that had already been done to combat corruption in the sector.

Tallying the progress the organisations gathered for the launch had made over the last year, Schreiber said the SIU, DHA, BMA, Hawks and National Prosecuting Authority had made strides towards enforcing accountability in the border and immigration environments. This included:

• 27 DHA officials were dismissed for fraud, corruption and sexual misconduct between July 2024 and February 2025, a number Schreiber said would increase once current appeals were concluded.


• Eight officials were convicted of fraud and corruption, and the criminal prosecution of 19 others is under way


• 10 BMA officials were dismissed for corruption and one for aiding and abetting corruption.

“The sum total of this work represents the biggest and most decisive crackdown on corruption to date in the immigration sector; by working together every day, we are painstakingly washing the stain of corruption and State Capture off of Home Affairs so that we can transform the department and the BMA into the proud institutions they deserve to be,” said Schreiber.

The BMA commissioner, Major General David Chilembe, said the launch of the BMIACF was a crucial milestone and came as the BMA was intensifying its fight against corruption at South Africa’s ports of entry and along the border line.

“The message to crooked officials is clear: we are cleaning house, and when we catch you, you will be out of the door within a matter of weeks,” said Schreiber.  

First line of defence

The Institute for Security Studies’ Willem Els told Daily Maverick that officials at the BMA and DHA “are our first line of defence when it comes to people and goods entering the country, and when they are compromised, it makes the work of organised crime networks much easier”.

Els used the illicit cigarette trade in South Africa to illustrate how transnational crime and corruption at the country's borders work hand in hand.

In 2020, 2021 and 2022, illicit cigarette sales in the country surpassed legal tobacco sales, costing South Africa R18-billion in tax revenue in 2022 alone.

Els said that in some instances, legal cigarette companies exploited gaps in the system by marking cigarettes for export when they were sold domestically, to evade the R25 tax on a box of cigarettes.

“They then issue a freight letter stating that 6,000 boxes of cigarettes are marked for export through Beitbridge. However, there are no cigarettes in the truck. The empty truck drives to the border post, where it encounters a compromised official who stamps the freight letter after accepting a bribe.”

The truck is then loaded with illicit cigarettes in Zimbabwe. This time, the freight letter states that the cargo is something else, such as shoes, which have a lower import tax. Once again, a corrupt border official signs off on the cargo, enabling smuggling to continue unchecked.

“They would never be able to do this if there weren’t corrupt officials at the border post.”

Els said that the ISS was working on a model mapping the structure of organised crime syndicates. He said public servants were often integral to these networks.

“In some cases, these corrupt officials are so deeply embedded in the system that they are effectively taking over the functions of the state. Once things reach that stage, it takes significant effort to fix the system.”

Els said that the launch of the BMIACF demonstrated the political will needed to combat corruption and cross-border crime. DM