Never queue at Home Affairs again

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber has announced plans to develop a digital platform to eliminate the need for in-person visits to Home Affairs offices.

BusinessTech reported that the department’s vision is to modernise its current paper-based, manual processes and transform them into a secure, automated, and user-friendly system.

Central to this transformation is an end-to-end digital platform that will handle all applications, adjudications, and communications between South Africans and the department.

The platform will allow citizens to access Home Affairs services online through a secure portal, comparable to widely used online banking platforms.

Schreiber said they could create secure profiles of every citizen and visitor to South Africa using existing facial and fingerprint recognition technology, such as the Face ID and fingerprint features found on smartphones.

He said if the department gets this right, the need to visit Home Affairs for routine transactions will be eliminated.

This shift would also enhance the work environment for department staff, allowing them to focus on more exciting and productive tasks.

“This would include devoting our staff to serving those who truly need it most,” said Schreiber.

“Including the poorest members of our society, people in rural areas, the 10% of South Africans who don’t yet use smart devices, and those exceptional or complicated cases that require more resources to resolve.”

Schreiber also outlined how the envisioned system might function.

After an online application for an ID, passport, certificate, or visa is submitted, a machine-learning-based risk engine will verify the completeness of the application.

The system will authenticate users, check for fraudulent documents, conduct facial recognition checks, cross-reference databases, process cashless transactions, and communicate the outcome to the applicant — all within seconds.

“No more standing in queues, no more waiting months or years for an outcome, no more being kept in the dark about the status of an application,” Schreiber said.

“And no more space for officials or syndicates to solicit bribes for a transaction to be processed.”

Once the system is in place, Schreiber said Home Affairs could deliver services to South Africans anywhere in the world.

“There is also no logical reason why we cannot offer a service where IDs and passports are delivered to the door of the applicant anywhere in the world — again, exactly like we already do in the banking sector with debit and credit cards,” he said.

The System is Offline

To realise his plans to fully digitise Home Affairs, Schreiber will first have to address how often Home Affairs offices can’t deliver services due to system downtime.

The Minister acknowledged the challenge in the first few weeks of being sworn in earlier this year.

“‘System Offline’. It needs to become a swear word. It really is not acceptable,” he said in an interview. “I would like to be the minister where the system is online, not offline.”

Schreiber said this would involve addressing the department’s failing Internet infrastructure without allowing for a “tender bonanza”.

“So I think that there’s low-hanging fruit here. The reality is that the Internet infrastructure that is failing Home Affairs in many cases is something that can be fixed,” he said.

“We’re in the year 2024. How can we not have fast enough Internet connections at these offices?”

“This is going to be a key focus for me. I think there is a real opportunity to make a visible impact in this regard,” Schreiber added.

The Department of Home Affairs has continued to suffer system outages despite promises that the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) spent R400 million revamping its whole network in 2022.

Most recently, Home Affairs suffered a significant outage in early January 2024, for which it blamed SITA.

In addition to causing immense frustration when South African residents apply for documents like passport renewals, system downtime at Home Affairs also delays critical processes like producing smart ID cards.

In April, former Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed in response to a Parliamentary Question that the department had lost nearly 141,000 hours of ID card production time since the 2019/20 financial year.