A police officer in
Swaziland sold fake driving licences, a court in the kingdom was told.
A traffic cop in Manzini,
Swaziland’s main commercial city, took E2,500 (US$200) for a fake document.
Hloniphile Gule appeared
before Mbabane Principal Magistrate Fikile Nhlabatsi after having been charged
with driving a car without a valid licence.
The Swazi
Observer reported (29 December 2017) that Gule told the court
that she obtained the document from a traffic police officer in Manzini in 2003
after paying him E2,500 in cash. She said she did not know the licence was a
fake.
The newspaper reported her
saying, ‘I started driving lessons in 2003 and after a few months, my
driving instructor said I was now ready to get a drivers licence. He took me
and four others to the Manzini Police Station where we met a traffic police
officer. The officer instructed all four of us to give him E2,500 each and wait
outside the police station.’
She said the officer who
was dressed in full police uniform gave licences to all five of them.
Gule pleaded guilty to the
offence and asked for leniency. She was sentenced to one year imprisonment with a fine
option of E2,000. The sentence was suspended for one year on condition she was
not found guilty of a similar offence.
People in Swaziland believe corruption in the kingdom
is rife, a survey published in December 2017 found. About 79 percent of 3,090
people interviewed said this in a survey conducted by the Swazi Ministry of
Justice and Constitution Affairs through the Anti-Corruption Commission.
The survey suggested that the perceived major causes
of corruption were poverty (58 percent), unemployment (54 percent) and greed
(41 percent).
In June 2017, the Open
Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) reported
the kingdom, which is ruled by King Mswati III as sub-Saharan Africa’s last
absolute monarch, was riddled with corruption in both private and public
places.
It said, ‘The results of grand corruption are there
for all to see in the ever increasing wealth of high-level civil servants and
officers of state.’
It added, ‘For a long time the police, the Ministry of
Finance, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Trade as well as the Department
of Customs and Excise have often been implicated in corrupt practices.’
It gave many examples including the case of the
government propaganda organisation Swaziland Broadcasting and Information
Service (SBIS) where E 1.6 million was paid to service providers for the maintenance
of a machine that was neither broken nor in use. The officer who authorised the bogus job cards
has since been promoted and transferred to another government department.
The report called The effectiveness of anti-corruption
agencies in Southern Africa stated, ‘This type of
behaviour is common albeit covert and therefore difficult to monitor as goods
and services are undersupplied or rerouted for personal use. The results of
grand corruption are there for all to see in the ever increasing wealth of
high-level civil servants and officers of state.’
See also
SWAZILAND
‘RIDDLED WITH CORRUPTION’
CORRUPTION
IN SWAZI GOVERNMENT ‘RIFE’
https://swazimedia.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/corruption-in-swazi-government-rife.html
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