Green ID book warning

The Department of Home Affairs has warned that South Africans who do not upgrade to smart ID cards are at risk of having their identities stolen.

To eliminate widespread ID fraud, Home Affairs wants to phase out the green barcoded ID books.

“We are migrating everyone to a smart card and phasing out the issuing of the green barcoded IDs so, that we can operate within a secure environment,” the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Njabulo Nzuza, told eNCA.

Before the Minister of Home Affairs can declare the old identity book invalid, the department must ensure that a critical mass of people have adopted the smart ID card.

As part of this drive, the department has extended its services to Saturdays until 12 October.

South Africa’s migration away from the old green ID book is years behind schedule.

When former home affairs minister Naledi Pandor first launched South Africa’s smart ID card project in 2013, the plan was to phase out the ID book and declare it invalid by 2021.

In a June 2013 notice published in the Government Gazette, Pandor said she would set a date by 2016 for fully phasing out old ID documents.

Her exact wording was “at least within three years from the effective date of this notice, or soon thereafter”.

The notice declared that all South African citizens and permanent residents would be required to apply for new identity cards from 18 July 2013.

However, permanent residents have never been able to apply for smart ID cards — a major problem that must be resolved before the old green ID books can be declared invalid.

Naturalised citizens faced a similar problem, although they may now seek an invitation to apply from the Home Affairs director-general.

Current home affairs minister Leon Schreiber has said that permanent residents would be allowed to apply for smart ID cards once his department has proven the system’s stability and capability to verify such applications.

Pandor’s original notice also stipulated that the smart ID rollout would follow a phased approach, starting with the elderly and first-time applicants who have just turned 16.

The plan was then to invite people to apply in stages according to their dates of birth.

However, the smart ID system was only opened to the broader public in 2016.

By then, former president Jacob Zuma had moved Pandor to the Science and Technology portfolio.

Malusi Gigaba took over as Minister of Home Affairs in May 2014, where he served until March 2017.

By March 2015, less than two million smart ID cards had been issued.

Former Department of Home Affairs director-general Mkuseli Apleni heralded this as a success.

“We are really moving, considering this process only started in 2013,” Apleni said.

However, for Home Affairs to replace the 38 million ID books it said were in circulation in 2013, it would’ve had to produce 4.75 million smart ID cards per year over eight years.

It has fallen far short of this number, with Home Affairs reporting that it had produced 2,613,248 smart ID cards in the 2022/23 financial year, and 2,822,236 in the 2023/24 financial year.

Home Affairs plans to produce a further 2.5 million cards in 2024/25.

Nzuza said during his budget vote speech this year that roughly 26 million South Africans hold smart ID cards.

He reiterated that the plan was to phase out green ID books when the number of smart ID cards reached 38 million.

Even ignoring that this doesn’t account for the new green ID books issued over the past 11 years, it would take another four years at 3 million smart IDs per year to get to this number.

Schreiber said in a recent statement that Home Affairs has taken its first steps towards digital transformation.

However, he acknowledged there was still much more to do.

“Our apex priority is the wholesale digital transformation of Home Affairs,” he said.

The aim is to create a new system where South Africans can submit ID and other applications from the comfort of their own home through a digital platform.

These documents are then delivered to their doorstep, anywhere in the world.

“We call this vision ‘Home Affairs @ home,'” said Schreiber.

The minister revealed his plans to fully digitise Home Affairs services in August 2024, saying that the only way to tackle fraud was to remove the opportunity for human intervention in the system.

“It is only possible for someone to steal an ID number or engage in fraudulent activity like swopping out photos because the system has gaps that allow for human intervention,” Schreiber said.

“Until such time as Home Affairs has been transformed into a digital-first department, these abuses will keep happening and ‘the system will remain offline.'”

South Africa already has an online-only Home Affairs system for smart IDs and passports called eHomeAffairs.

One of the key successes of the system is a pilot programme where Home Affairs officials were stationed in a handful of bank branches around the country.

This allowed born citizens to apply for their smart ID or passport and visit their bank to capture their biometric data and collect their documents when they were finished.

The progress of this pilot had stalled at 30 branches pending the finalisation of a public-private partnership (PPP) agreement between the banks and the Department of Home Affairs.

Supported branches are currently unevenly scattered around the country and split between Absa, FNB, Nedbank, and Standard Bank. Discovery and Investec also offer eHomeAffairs services at one location each.

The Banking Association of South Africa’s prudential head, Mark Brits, recently told MyBroadband that they are nearing the finalisation of legal agreements with Home Affairs.

This will allow more bank branches to support smart ID card applications and passport renewals.

The one major adjustment in the PPP agreement is that the banks will be able to deploy their own staff to process applications and collections.

Home Affairs staff will be released back to the department to help strengthen services at its own offices.

This is a win-win, as the banks wanted more control over the branch environments and Schreiber recently said that Home Affairs was short on staff thanks to years of budget cuts.