So as you may know, I am a marriage officer, and we have a marriage officers whatsapp group, for all the marriage officers who are registered through our local home affairs branch. The number of complaints on there about just how absolutely obtuse and frustrating the branch can be with the requirements needed to submit marriages is disheartening. Guys are just giving up, and handing their marriage books back to home affairs because they make it so impossible to actually get anything done there. Two examples that I know of....
1) Our local home affairs branch has introduced a requirement that anyone wanting to get married in a church, has to first present themselves at home affairs in order to do an "Online Verification Check" where they check by the fingerprints, that the person who is getting married is in fact the owner of that ID number. As far as I know there is no other Home Affairs branch in the country that has this same requirement (because when I send the couple to any other branch they are told that this is nonsense and it is NOT a requirement for marriage). The crazy thing is, when we marriage officers submit the documents to home affairs, the first thing they do is to repeat this online verification step, making it completely unnecessary for the couple to have done that.
2) The Home Affairs branch has now introduced a requirement, that if you get married with an ante nuptial contract, you have to wait for the stamped deeds office copy to be returned to the Attorney, and you have to include a copy of that stamped document with the marriage documents. There is no legislation or circular which stipulates this requirement. When we tell the attorneys about this requirement, they laugh at us and tell us that the Ante-Nuptial contract is none of Home Affairs business (in which point they are absolutely correct). You are not even required to tell Home Affairs if you are doing an ante-nuptial contract. It is not in the scope of their administration.
We have contacted the main Home Affairs head office and the Director General's office multiple times, but so far we have had no luck in getting them to correct this dismal state of affairs.
