A victory for clean administration

When a specialist police unit launched an undercover, anti-corruption sting on staff at a busy South African border post, their agent found what many ordinary people have long known: it is indeed possible to ‘bribe your way through’. A participant in the covert operation was given a passport that did not belong to him and R350; then sent out to test the probity of the officials who dealt with him. Before long he was through – with R100 change. All it took was R200 between the pages of an invalid passport offered to, and accepted by a police officer. And R50, similarly interleaved in the passport, offered to and accepted by an immigration officer. But when the immigration official was dismissed, following a disciplinary inquiry, she took the matter to arbitration and the commissioner ordered that she be reinstated. In her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, legal writer Carmel Rickard looks at the case that followed, heard in the Labour Court.