We tested driver’s licence and home affairs office phone numbers — not one call was answered

MyBroadband called multiple Home Affairs and driver’s licensing offices in Gauteng, and none of the officially listed numbers were answered.

Many South Africans need to interact with government services regularly for critical documents.

Two such essential services are the Department of Home Affairs and driver’s licence testing centres, which issue documents like ID cards, passports, and driving and vehicle licences.

MyBroadband looked up the numbers for many of these offices in Gauteng and tried calling them to see if we could get through to operators.

We picked eight Home Affairs offices and six licensing departments to test.

The Home Affairs offices each had one or two numbers on the Department of Home Affairs website.

We could not find official numbers for the licensing centres in Pretoria on the government website.

The licensing centres in Johannesburg each had one or more numbers listed on a government page.

Overall, we collected 11 numbers for Home Affairs and 5 for licensing centres.

We called each of the numbers from two sim cards, one on Vodacom and one on MTN, to prevent any false negatives due to network problems.

The results were the same from both networks — not even one of our calls to these official numbers was answered.

Only six numbers rang, but these were never answered, even after multiple attempts.

The rest of the official numbers always gave a busy tone or failed to connect outright, which indicates that there may be technical issues with these numbers.

We also tried looking for alternative numbers for these departments and found a few on Google Maps that differed from the official numbers.

We found numbers for three licensing centres in Pretoria and the Home Affairs in Mamelodi, Randfontein and Vanderbijlpark.

The Akasia and Centurion Licensing centres listed the same number, which was directed to a machine with various City of Tshwane services.

After a few prompts, we could be directed to an operator through this number.

The Home Affairs in Vanderbijlpark answered their unofficial number listed on Google Maps but not the one listed on the government website.

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