"For example, if a CEO of a company or any critical skill joins a company, they need to give us a police clearance for 20 years. Now you might find that person has been to four, five countries and he has to write to all these different countries to ask for clearance from the police.

"So our view is that genuine credible business entities, companies, should be able to do their checking themselves and should be able to take responsibility for the people they bring into this country and therefore we are developing a system which is going to make it very easy to get a permit.

"At the same time we are going to put quite strong measures for people who are high risk, who are abusing our system."

Dlamini-Zuma said the new system would allow for longer permits for foreign workers and students, so that they no longer had to renew their documents every year.

"What self-respecting engineer would want to leave his or her country to come to a country where the permit is one year. We are giving them enough years so that they can plan their lives."

Similarly visas for students should be valid for the entire duration of their studies.

The current system contributed to backlogs and corruption as it created scope for officials to demand bribes from frustrated applicants, she said.

She said her department had implemented a tracking system for work permit applications and hoped to clear its existing backlog by mid-year.

"We are confident that we are dealing with them and as soon as we have cleared the backlog we will not accumulate another backlog."

Meanwhile, Dlamini-Zuma will meet with her Zimbabwean counterparts on Monday to discuss delays in issuing passports to Zimbabweans seeking to regularise their stay in South Africa.

Dlamini-Zuma said on Friday her department's drive to issue valid residency, work and study permits to more than a quarter of a million Zimbaweans living in South Africa was being hampered by problems on Harare's part in providing applicants with passports.

"We have a dependency we cannot do anything about. It depends on them," she told the media briefing in Cape Town.

"We are still awaiting passports from the applicants who are awaiting them from the Zimbabwean government."

She said at this point it was not possible to say how many of the 275 762 Zimbabweans who had applied for documents to enable them to remain in South Africa, lacked valid Zimbabwean passports but hoped the meeting would make it clear.

The government last year launched a campaign to regularise Zimbabweans' status in South Africa after the political situation in the neighbouring state stabilised.

The meeting with Zimbabwe's two home affairs ministers, Kembo Mohandi and Theresa Makone, is expected to extend over two days.