The words of my only Zimbabwean employee who I was chatting with this afternoon making sure he had all the correct work documents. The fines being thrown around and rightly so are quite severe. 10% of the annual undocumented workers salary, R100K ($5K) or a mixture of a financial fine and imprisonment.
He was given time off in September last year to get his documents in order and he explained how difficult it was. The transport to Pretoria each day cost R200 ($10) and he joined thousands of others in the queue outside. His papers at the time had expired and why we pushed him to get this done and stay legal.
On the 5th day of queueing outside every day he was pulled aside with 20 others so the officials could help prepare them for when they were inside by filling out the right forms. This is where he was advised to pay the extra R1.5K on top of the R1K application fee. At this point having already paid R1K in transport fees he felt he had no other choices. The officials know they are desperate and vulnerable so this is easy pickings. Having paid there was no more worries nd he was processed fairly quickly.
He then explained that the R1.5K was not that bad eve tough he knows it is very wrong as the police charge the same rate if they find you have no documents or they are expired. Corruption is everywhere and the officials are making an absolute fortune by the system they have created.
Having everyone waiting outside in the car park and separating putting people in batches of 20 allows them to do the corrupt deals off site and not in a government building. When I was doing the Portuguese visa Home Affairs was on another floor in the same building and I noticed everyone queueing across the road being "helped" by officials.
There is big money being made every day and you have to wonder if the open borders are open for a reason as so many corrupt government officials are benefitting having a lucrative extra income. If you consider 500K Zimbabweans are documented there are another 1.5 million undocumented. That is a lot of R1.5K corrupt payments processed and more to come even if we were naïve enough to believe only 20% paid "bribes" as my guy reckons his whole entire group of 20 paid up as they had no choice. If they do 50 groups per day that is R1.5 million ($75K) in corrupt earnings made daily which they obviously share with those officials working inside the offices.
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