Home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi takes strong exception to any suggestion that his department’s systems are in a state of collapse.
During a brief doorstop in March, he agreed to an interview with the FM. Since then, however, he’s struggled to find the time. He has, in fairness, been trying to douse the flames of xenophobic violence, as perpetrators take action against people they say are in SA without proper documentation.
When he isn’t dealing with immigration headaches, Motsoaledi’s inbox is probably flooded with requests from citizens frustrated by the home affairs system. The DA’s spokesperson on home affairs, MP Angel Khanyile, has even set up an automated WhatsApp response directing people with queries about their identity documents and passports to e-mail her instead.
It suggests there’s still a distance to go before the department of home affairs is able to offer a functional service.
On April 1, for example, every one of SA’s 412 home affairs offices was offline due to a “cable breakage”. Not that outages at individual offices are unusual: they happen almost every day, and applying for documents has become a hit-and-miss affair.
Some in the department even whisper that this is deliberate sabotage by home affairs staff.
Yet the official downtime, according to the minister at least, seems negligible. In response to a recent parliamentary question from DA MP Adrian Roos, Motsoaledi said systems at home affairs offices were down just 4.39% of the time between April last year and February this year — outages he attributed to power cuts. The 1.26% downtime the department experienced in the year before was due to cable theft, he added.
“The department never closed its offices due to system downtimes and continued to render services that are not system-dependent, such as birth, marriage and death certificates,” he said.
There were, indeed, reports that officials were issuing handwritten death certificates during the downtime earlier this month.
Long queues at home affairs offices are a regular sight. Those in the queues are exposed to the sun and the rain, as well as unscrupulous agents demanding bribes in exchange for services.
This is despite the “war on queues” strategy announced by the then minister Malusi Gigaba in 2018, which included dedicated collection kiosks.
If the “war” is still being waged, the department certainly isn’t winning yet.
If anything, there are claims that the bribe-taking in queues is getting worse. “It is becoming highly problematic and it is difficult to show quantitatively,” Roos tells the FM.
Khanyile says that during an oversight visit last Thursday, she found there was no electricity at the home affairs office in Balfour, Mpumalanga. The utilities bill hadn’t been paid.
“All community members were turned away,” she says.
The biometric system has been broken since February 2021, she adds, which means the office hasn’t been able to print temporary IDs for more than a year, leaving residents to travel to neighbouring towns for this service.
In Nigel and Springs, Khanyile says people who started queuing at 5am were still waiting for service by noon. “The cause of these long queues is the home affairs system that gets offline most of the time,” she says.
By her estimate, it amounts to a loss of about 40 hours — or five days — of work a month, with little intervention to make up for lost time.
One thing Motsoaledi’s department has admitted is that its systems need to be upgraded. Problems on that count date back to 2015, at least.
While updating parliament’s portfolio committee on home affairs on the “war on queues” in August last year, home affairs director-general Tommy Makhode said the long lines were due to unpredictable walk-ins, the discontinuation of Saturday working hours due to disagreements with the unions, inadequate leadership and front-office space, unstable systems, inefficient workflows and unco-ordinated communications strategies.
Makhode told MPs that home affairs had finalised an appointment system, which would allow clients to use ID numbers to book slots directly, and prevent bribe-taking agents from doing so.
On the issue of Saturday working hours, trade unions wanted employees to be paid overtime. Home affairs, however, claimed not to have the funds for that, so suggested instead that the offices move to a shift system, with employees working 45 hours a week and taking time off on a weekday, he said.
When it came to network problems, Makhode said home affairs had engaged with the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) about its unstable systems, and “some of the disconnected sites were attended to”.
The department is waiting to be given access to preapproved connectivity service providers so it can skip “onerous procurement processes”.
Sita promised to implement this in the 2022/2023 financial year.
Home affairs is “responsible for the upgrade and maintenance of the dilapidated network equipment like routers and switches”, Makhode said, while Sita is responsible for upgrading its switching centres and the expansion of its core network to reduce regional network outages.
In a later update to parliament, the department said the process was protracted because the two systems have to be upgraded simultaneously — something that requires some co-ordination.
The department has also redesigned workflow processes and separated the queues for different applications. Only, this seems to have caused more confusion, as the different queues aren’t always clearly marked.
To alleviate bottlenecks, all office managers have been directed to be on the floor for effective management and to ensure they are “visible and accessible to clients”, Makhode said. There are also proposals to deploy more queue marshals.
A special team is also set to be appointed to visit offices with high volumes of visitors to monitor and evaluate efficiency, and 100 mobile units are available for deployment to service citizens in far-flung areas, according to Makhode.
There is another service — a public-private partnership between home affairs and banks — that aims to reduce queues. In April 2016, the eHomeAffairs online application service was launched, which enables applicants to apply for a Smart ID or passport, and book online to visit a bank branch to complete the biometrics and pick up their documents.
Of course, the quality of that service depends on home affairs’ systems being up and running.
Six years on, the service is available in just 27 bank branches. While the plan is to roll the service out to a total of 70 branches, it has fallen behind schedule.
In another parliamentary reply to Roos, Motsoaledi rather cryptically ascribes the delay to “a number of pertinent issues that still need to be resolved between the parties” before partnership agreements can be signed with the banks.
Once these are signed, system support can be provided at the banks, dedicated home affairs officials can be assigned and bank officials can be trained, he said.
Still, Roos tells how, at an Absa branch in Stellenbosch, the home affairs service hasn’t yet been activated — even though the equipment has been in place for two years.
Meanwhile, the bookings channel that allows customers to make appointments directly at some home affairs offices in the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng has been piloted. A number of people have taken to social media to report their satisfaction with it and praise home affairs — but it’s still not perfect. News website New Frame earlier this month reported that some clients resorted to standing in the long queues after they had issues with the system.
The online appointment system “will not yield any desirable results if the department does not give immediate attention to its network issues”, Khanyile says.
That means more computers have to be provided to address the long queues, she says — which shouldn’t be a space problem, given the number of empty cubicles in home affairs offices.
“The issue of long queues has been raised for far too long,” she says. “It is about time it’s given the attention it deserves to ensure members of the community get the services they require without losing days of work.”
Home affairs abroad
There were 11,343 applications for passports at the home affairs office in London between January 2019 and July 2021, home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi said in reply to a parliamentary question from the DA last year. Birth registrations totalled 1,037.
Of those, 104 birth registrations and 873 passport applications still had to be processed.
South Africans abroad have been complaining about delays in getting services on both. It can take several months just to schedule an appointment, which means it could take one or two years in total to apply for a new SA passport.
Motsoaledi said the system allows for an appointment to be scheduled within 90 days of the request, and the mission can schedule 28 such appointments each day.
“Delays are mainly due to late receipt of diplomatic bags,” he said, adding that a dedicated e-mail address has been created by the departments of home affairs and international relations & co-operation for “long-outstanding applications”.
The applications process is being automated in the medium to long term “with the aim of ultimately reducing turnaround times”, he said.
Six months later, when facing a similar question in parliament, Motsoaledi mentioned the possibility of using courier companies to speed up delivery.
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