Thirteen years ago, the government announced its goal of systematically phasing out the old green identity book in favour of the smart ID card. Yet 90 of about 329 home affairs offices across the country still offer only the green ID book, lacking the capacity to print the smart card.
This is set to change. Last week, home affairs minister Leon Schreiber announced that all production of the document will stop by March and, one year later, it will no longer be recognised as an official form of identification.
The green ID book, while iconic to some, has been at the heart of South Africa’s identity fraud crisis; it is rated as the ID document most susceptible to forgery in Africa, 500 times more so than the smart ID card that replaced it.
In fact, just one day before Schreiber’s announcement, two home affairs officials — Aluwani Andries Netshidaulu and Nthombifuthi Phyllis Mokwebo — appeared in court for pairing the identity details of South African citizens with pictures of foreign nationals to create fake passports. They were part of a far-reaching syndicate, with luxury vehicles and hundreds of fake passports linked to the criminal network seized by the Hawks.
Schreiber’s announcement is set against a rise in anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa. The ease with which the document is forged fuels the migration crisis in many ways.
Since he took office in 2024, automation has been Schreiber’s singular obsession and priority in dealing with the vast problems that beset home affairs. Significantly, he says department officials are wholly on board, particularly front-line workers, with the approach seen as a way to catapult the department into the future.
“It’s a major milestone … we have done a lot of work to get to the point where we are confident enough to say that we will now be able to cease production of this book in March next year and then stop recognising it in March 2028,” he says.
Schreiber is confident that he is making serious progress in overcoming the many challenges facing the department. He is, in a sense, circumventing them through a far-reaching modernisation programme akin to that undertaken by the South African Revenue Service in the early days of democracy.
“I think the mistake that we often make in South Africa is we focus on who the perpetrators are and holding them accountable as the only intervention,” Schreiber says. “It’s critically important to do that. We’ve dismissed 144 officials, we’ve arrested dozens, we’ve had 10 successful convictions in these 2½ years. So that is important, don’t get me wrong,” he says.
But, he says, as important is “zooming in on the systemic loopholes that these people have exploited for many years … the solution to that, in all of these cases, is to automate — to use the tools that now exist.”
Automation, Schreiber says, removes the space for discretion and interference.
A broader security ecosystem
The reason it will take two years to scrap the green ID book is that the 90 non-modernised offices need to be tackled, naturalised citizens and permanent residents have to be added to the list of those eligible for smart ID cards, embassies abroad have to be capacitated to shift from issuing South Africans with green ID books to smart ID cards, and provision has to be made to ensure names from all groups in South Africa, such as the Khoi-San, can be printed on a smart ID card.
Schreiber is confident that this will be done by the March 2027 deadline.
The shift helps strengthen the security around other important documents; an individual with a forged green ID book could use it to access a passport or driver’s licence. A digital ID will be as secure as online banking, he adds — the most secure operations on modern smartphones.
“So I would say that security in home affairs is graduating from an extraordinarily low base, based on these manual systems … into a similar level of security as you would have with online banking,” says Schreiber.
“Our job is to be mindful that nothing can ever be taken for granted, but … we’re at the same level of security in a sense as those other critical systems … we are at the cutting edge of where this technology is. It doesn’t mean that something can’t go wrong … we’re not naive about that.”
The milestones in automation reached in recent months — including adding more than 300 bank branches to the list issuing smart cards, bringing the total to 515 across the country — are significant steps forward for the department.
Reaching the March 2028 deadline to lay the green ID book to rest will mark another leap forward for South Africa and home affairs.
Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
