Official guilty of taking R350 ID document bribe

A former Department of Home Affairs official was found guilty of corruption for assisting an applicant to obtain an identity document without a birth certificate.

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Cape Town – A former Department of Home Affairs official who received R350 to assist an applicant in need of an identity document, without his required birth certificate, was found guilty of corruption on Wednesday.

Mncedi Quambela, formerly a senior official in charge of the issue of marriage certificates, appeared in the Specialised Commercial Crime Court in Bellville before magistrate Sabrina Sonnenberg.

At the time of the incident, in October 2013, Quambela was unaware that the applicant was in fact a police official, acting as an agent in an undercover police operation to trap him.

The trap was authorised by the Western Cape Directorate for Public Prosecutions due to suspicions that Qambela was involved in corruption.

According to the charge sheet, Qambela received a call on his mobile telephone, from the undercover agent, who introduced himself as Bulelani Nopanjwa and said he wished to apply for an ID document.

Nopanjwa explained that he did not have his birth certificate as required for the purposes of obtaining an ID, but Qambela offered to assist him nevertheless, if Nopanjwa gave him R350, reportedly for a teacher to issue a letter that falsely confirmed that Nopanjwa had been one of the teacher’s pupils. This letter would suffice as the missing birth certificate.

Nopanjwa gave Qambela the R350 in a cloakroom at the Home Affairs building in Wynberg, in Cape Town’s southern suburbs, at which point Qambela was arrested.

The magistrate ruled that Qambela accepted the money, not to give to any teacher, but as bribe to process Nopanjwa’s application without the required birth certificate.

She said Qambela had not impressed the court as an honest person whilst testifying in his own defence.

She said he had had a fair trial and that the testimony against him had been accepted in the interests of justice. Prosecutor Derek Vogel had proved the State’s case beyond reasonable doubt, she said.

Defence attorney Mujahid Adams is to address the court in mitigation of sentence on Thursday.

Qambela had been out on warning, but the magistrate revoked this and ordered that he remain in custody, following the guilty verdict.

African News Agency

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