A Nation on Sunday investigation has established that despite efforts by governance institutions to stem corruption at the Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services, the vice continues unabated.
Our probe, conducted in the past six months, has established that paying the application fee of K50 000 for an ordinary passport, is no guarantee that you will get it when it is ready.
Unscrupulous Immigration officers demand a collection fee, ranging from K100 000 to K300 000, which is shared among those who process and print the document.
If an applicant does not pay extra, then he or she should forget about accessing the passport even when it is ready for collection.
Some people whose ordinary passports were printed early last year have not collected them because they do not have extra cash to pay the officers.
The money-hungry officers tell applicants plainly that collecting a passport has its own fee. No receipts are issued for this.
Having heard numerous reports about rampant corruption at passport offices, on October 11 2024, Nation on Sunday set out to prove the veracity of the stories.
Our investigative journalist visited the Department of Immigration in Blantyre where he observed challenges people face when collecting their passports.
He met four men and a woman whose passports were printed in August 2024, but could not collect them because the officers keeping them were demanding extra money, which the five applicants did not have.
They showed our journalist receipts which they were told to present to the officers to collect their passports.
Our undercover journalist took the receipts and checked with the department on the status of their passports. The officers said the passports were issued in August 2024 and that the owners should be notified.
“Tell the owners to come and collect them,” said an officer Nation on Sunday approached.
That same afternoon, one of the four men presented the receipt to the officer who had instructed our undercover journalist to inform the owners to go in person and collect their travel documents.
The man spent the rest of that afternoon at the department to no avail. It was the same story for the other three men who went to the department the following day. Unless they paid the collection fee, they were told, they should forget their documents.
For five months—from October last year to February this year—the four men had been pleading with officers at the department to give them their passports, but to no avail.
Testing the system
Nation on Sunday arranged funds to pay ‘collection fee’ for two people—a man and a woman—to prove that for one to collect a passport, she or he has to pay extra to certain Immigration officers.
The woman was a 25-year-old applicant who lives in Balaka District and was told by an Immigration officer that she could not collect her passport because she did not have the money demanded by the officer who was keeping it.
She said she needed the passport to escort a sick relation to South Africa for medical treatment. When she pleaded to pay the officer K50 000, she was told the money was too little.
“I have been told to make it K150 000 failing which I won’t access the passport. But there is no way I can raise that amount,” she said.
On February 2, 2025 we took over the process of accessing the passports for the woman and another applicant we had met at the Immigration Department.
Our journalist called the Immigration officer keeping the woman’s passport and told him that he had been sent to collect two passports—for the woman and the man. Our journalist gave the officer the names of the applicants.
The passport officer responded: “Tidalankhulana ndi eni passport koma zimene ndidapangana nawozo sadanditumizire [I talked with the passport owners, but they are yet to send what we agreed]. So let me ask him.”
We asked if it was money and the officer responded: “Mulinayo [Do you have the money]? Where are you? Do you have the K200 000 with you?”
We then agreed to meet at the Immigration office.
“Come straight to my office. If someone blocks you, tell them that you’re my relative,” the officer added.
When our journalist entered the office, the officer closed the door and asked for the money, which the undercover reporter, while recording everything, handed over K400 000 for two passports. The officer counted the money and said: “Yes, it’s the right amount.”
The officer then took out the two passports from a desk drawer and gave them to him.
“Now I need to send this money to Lilongwe to the officer who helped us to print the passports,” the officer added.
That is how in just an hour our journalist got two passports whose owners could not get since August last year.
But Department of Immigration and Citizenship Services spokesperson Wellington Chiponde, when told of our findings, said his department had not received any official complaint pertaining to the allegations.
“It is worth noting that, as a department, we do not condone such corrupt practices and we have in place a formal procedure for handling complaints from clients,” he said.
Chiponde also said Immigration services has prescribed fees which are gazetted and no extra fees should be demanded from clients.
He said: “We have in place an Institutional Integrity Committee that understands its assignments and, for a law enforcement institution like our department, professionalism and discipline are of paramount importance.
“We also use various platforms to engage with our clients to desist from engaging in unscrupulous individuals [middlemen or dobadobas] who impersonate our officers to swindle them money.
“We also have a working relationship with the Anti-Corruption Bureau [ACB] in implementing various activities targeting both our officers and the general public to prevent corrupt practices.”
In July 2024, ACB arrested four Immigration officers in Lilongwe and two civilians for alleged corrupt practices in the processing of passports at the department.
The bureau, working with the Malawi Police Service, raided the Lilongwe Immigration offices to arrest the suspects.
Parliamentary Committee on Defence and Security chairperson Salim Bagus said in a WhatsApp response on Wednesday that his committee has been getting reports that the department’s officials are demanding bribes from passport applicants.
“So, we summoned commissioners from the Immigration Department last week over [the] reports,” he said. “They told us they are not aware of reports to do with bribes. But they promised to conduct tours to sensitise people over the same and I am told this week, they were in Lilongwe for the same issue.”
And in reaction to reports of rampant corruption it receives, the Office of the Ombudsman plans to establish Sectoral Ombudsman mechanisms at the Department of Immigration, Road Traffic Directorate and Ministry of Education.
Ombudsman Grace Malera said this will follow the model of the Hospital Ombudsman mechanism which the office piloted and rolled out in public hospitals, health centres and units in the country.
She said her office is responsible for institutionalising ethics, accountability and integrity in public institutions through building capacity of internal complaints mechanisms, sensitising public officers and investigating related matters.
Malera added that for the past eight years the institution has received numerous general complaints from the public, when engaging in mobile accountability clinics, on inefficiency, including delays at the Immigration Department in the delivery of services.
Malera explained: “Perceptions of favouritism, unethical conduct, malpractices and bribery have been dominant features of complaints, as observed from engagement with communities through mobile accountability.
“In addition, there are also specific complaints that individuals have lodged with the Office of the Ombudsman against the Road Traffic and Immigration departments. Furthermore, there are increasingly higher numbers of complaints on maladministration in the education sector that the office handles.”
