The system is down — some Home Affairs branches only have 2Mbps connections

The Department of Home Affairs’ extensive downtime and slow systems shouldn’t be surprising, considering some offices still rely on 2Mbps connections.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber revealed this in an interview with Newzroom Afrika, where he said he is committed to fixing the issue.

This comes after the department, under former minister Aaron Motsoaledi, lost over 136,000 hours of working time in 2023 due to system downtime.

“If there were more hours in a day, I would use them all. I am obsessed with this particular issue because it can be fixed,” said Schreiber.

“One of the fundamental problems is something as elementary as bandwidth. We’re sitting with offices that have 2Mbps lines in the year 2024.”

He said his department conducted comparisons between branches with slow Internet connections and those with higher-speed lines, such as the Weinberg office in Cape Town, which has a 1Gbps connection.

“You cannot imagine the difference it makes. It solves a large majority of the ‘system offline’ challenges that we have,” said Schreiber.

He added that he is engaging with communications minister Solly Malatsi to determine how Home Affairs can work more effectively with the State Information Technology Agency (SITA).

“It often creates a bottleneck. Home Affairs can’t solve some of these things. You have to go through SITA,” said Schreiber.

“So if we can get some more control over literally the Internet connections at our offices, you will see an improvement there.”

He noted that a significant frustration for South Africans using Home Affairs services is when system downtime is combined with long queues.

“If we can address these two things in tandem, we’ll see a big improvement in how people experience home affairs,” he said.

Schreiber noted that how Home Affairs’ processes are set up also results in bottlenecks. At any branch, five counters may be operating, but then each person must go to one photo booth, creating a backlog.

They then need to go to one cashier, creating another bottleneck.

“We are looking at ways of integrating it so you never have to leave that counter,” he added.

Since he was appointed Home Affairs Minister, Schreiber has set his sights on addressing the challenge of system downtime at the department’s offices.

He previously said the phrase “system offline” needs to become a swear word.

“It really is not acceptable. I would like to be the minister where the system is online, not offline,” said Schreiber.

System downtime has plagued the department for several years, despite SITA investing large amounts of money revamping Home Affairs’ network in 2022.

It suffered a wide-reaching outage in January 2024, for which it blamed SITA. 

In a statement released after the Democratic Alliance (DA) informed the public about the issues, Home Affairs said a technical problem on SITA’s mainframe hindered access to the National Population Register.

Its systems were restored later that same day.

“The system was back online from around midday today [Thursday] and services were available to citizens and other clients,” the department said in a subsequent statement.

Former minister Motsoaledi revealed the extent of system downtime at Home Affairs offices in April 2024 through a response to parliamentary questions from DA MP Adrian Roos.

Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of hours of smart ID production time lost to technical challenges and load-shedding on a per-province basis over the past four financial years.

Offices in the Eastern Cape suffered the most, with 34,000 hours lost over the four years, with Mpumalanga offices — the next hardest hit — losing 17,615 hours.

Gauteng, Western Cape, Limpopo, and Northern Cape offices lost between 12,366 hours and 14,680 hours over the four years.

Altogether, more than 136,000 hours of work time were lost at Home Affairs offices across South Africa over the four years.