marriage scam Nawaal Deane South African women who are being roped into illegal marriage syndicates are being paid off at prices determined by their race. These illegal agencies charge foreigners seeking citizenship R800 to R2 000 for a black bride, while Indian and coloured women retail for R4 000 and white women for R6 000. Bride scams have been on the increase in Gauteng, with 22 women reporting cases where they have unwittingly married foreigners seeking wives to guarantee permanent residence. Agents operate as ”immigration consultants”.
Mangesha Kabeda, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), says that in the absence of regulations regarding which countries’ refugees should be given asylum, there has been an influx of foreigners who are trying to regularise themselves. These false marriages are performed to speed up their applications for permanent residence.
A Pakistani man who has lived in South Africa for two years said his marriage to a black woman cost him R3 000. ”I went to the agent’s house in Laudium and there were two black ladies sitting in the room,” said Mr X. He chose the woman he preferred and the agent accompanied the couple to the Department of Home Affairs for the marriage ceremony. According to Mr X, the paperwork was organised by the agent, who he then paid R3 000. His wife is currently living with her family in Mabapone. ”After one year I received a South African ID book and passport,” he said. The Laudium Sun, a suburban Pretoria newspaper, reported last month that its investigations into syndicates operating in the area had revealed a sliding scale of ”prices”
according to race. Residents of Laudium confirmed that the race-determined price scale for brides was common cause. The agents employ scouts to operate in squatter camps and suburbs.
In Diepkloof and Hillbrow women are lured by scouts or advertisements and some say they signed marriage
certificates believing they were employment forms. Four of the women who reported these incidents claimed the forms were obscured by other documents. ”I saw the words written on top of the other paper which said ‘marriage certificate’, but I had already signed,” said Alice Ntsomi. The Soweto fraud unit has a statement by a recruiting agent, Adelaide Piennaar, that she ”recruited seven women for two Indian men and received R100 for each lady”.
Some of the women allegedly involved in the scams say they were taken to Lenasia where a priest married them to Pakistani and Indian men. The priest, Pandit Umiashanker, claims he has not committed any crime and it is the agents that have to be stopped. ”I do not perform so-called fake marriages,” he says. All the women taken to this priest reported that on entering his home he asked to see their identity documents, but did not ask for the documents of their prospective grooms. The Department of Home Affairs is currently investigating
2 652 fraudulent marriages. Manase Makwela, the department’s representative, said: ”We marry a couple on good faith. Who are we to stop it if they meet the requirements?”
Clifford Setshwane, a detective at the Soweto fraud unit, said:”If home affairs is investigating these marriages, as they claim, then why have they not selected someone to speak to these women or supply the necessary marriage certificates to speed up the investigation?” In a statement given to Setshwane, Lindwe Ngiba, who was also falsely married, described the attitude of a home affairs employee after she signed the marriage certificate: ”The employee asked me whether I knew what was going on about the forms. I told him I don’t know, as I was given forms to sign and was not given a chance to read them.” The employee then went to a separate cubicle where he was paid by the unknown man accompanying the couple. The onus appears to be on the women involved in the scam to apply for an annulment and find their absent husbands. Few of the women are able to afford lawyers’ fees and most are despondent. According to Makwela, some of the women go into marriages aware that they are participating in a scam but claim ignorance when the deal falls through and their husbands disappear. A far cheaper – and seemingly more heartless – approach is when a foreigner pretends to fall in love with a woman and she marries him out of love. This happened to Nomsa Sithole, who fell in love with Ali Mohammed, a Pakistani man. He disappeared a month after their marriage with her ID book. ”I don’t have my ID book and I can’t get married again until I find him,” said Sithole. She refused to have her picture taken because she has been threatened by agents who accused her of ”ruining their business” after an article exposing the scams was published in Drum magazine. The Department of Home Affairs has not taken measures to prevent or annul these marriages. Investigations are proceeding, but slowly. Kabeda of the UNHCR, which does not condone the criminality of asylum-seekers, says ”the ones who are victimised are the foreigners and they should not be the scapegoat for the crimes of the nationals”.