Thuli Makhubu, the Mail & Guardian’s receptionist, is a few weeks away from giving birth to her second child. Sameer Mehta, her ”husband” of two years, whom she found out about two weeks ago, is in hiding, being protected from her wrath by the department of home affairs.
Late last month Makhubu went to the department of labour offices in Orlando to apply for her maternity benefits, in anticipation of her maternity leave. When her identity number was verified, she was told that she’d have to apply for a new identity document to reflect her ”new surname” before submitting the required forms.
Adamant that she was still single, she went to the home affairs department to double check. There she was told to go to the police station to get an affidavit declaring the marriage to be false and return to fill in a marriage status verification form.
In the M&G’s initial contact with the department this week, spokesperson Nkosana Sibuyi seemed eager to help locate Makhubu’s marriage officer and to establish whether or not the marriage was valid as he was aware that this meant that she could not register the birth of her child, or access her benefits, until she and her mystery husband were reconciled.
Before setting off to investigate, he nonetheless went into a lengthy rant about how ”these South African women have been known to take money from these foreigners in exchange for a legal status and then a month later they come running to us telling us they do not know their husband”.
Unsurprisingly, Sibuyi called us back a few hours later empty-handed, quipping, ”Maa’m you must understand that most of our operations are still being conducted manually. So the marriage officers name may or may not appear on the electronic system, then one has to find the original [marriage certificate] and that could take a while.”
As for Makhubu, when she went to the Orlando West, Soweto, branch of the home affairs department, Sibongile Miya, a home affairs official, told her that the investigation into her alleged marriage would take anywhere from six weeks to five months to complete. The whereabouts of her estranged ”spouse” could not be revealed ”for [his] security”.
When the M&G contacted the same official a day later, the official told us the man’s name, his physical address, his ID number, the date of the marriage, the name of the marriage officer as well as the address of the Pinetown office where the marriage allegedly took place — all in the space of a five-minute phone call.
Using Makhubu’s ID number and that of her fake husband’s, we were able to verify the date of her ”marriage” as July 23 2004. We also found the fake husband’s ID number on the marriage status verification website, along with confirmation that he is married to Makhubu. A disclaimer on the page states that the service ”is only available to South African citizens”, meaning that Makhubu’s ”husband” must be in possession of a valid South African identity document.
Earlier this week, a Special Assignment investigation revealed that all it took to obtain an ”authentic” identity document was between R650 and R2 000. In the programme, Duduzile Tshuma, a Zimbabwean citizen, illegally obtained four identity documents, a temporary ID, a temporary refugee permit and several birth certificates at various home affairs offices in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal.