Good news for green ID books

South Africa’s Home Affairs department is picking up speed in its smart ID card rollout, but it will likely be many years before it can invalidate the green ID book.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber recently announced his department had issued 2.65 million smart ID cards in the three quarters from April 2024 to December 2024.

That was already around 150,000 more than the department’s annual target of 2.5 million new cards.

The last quarter of 2024 saw nearly one million new cards issued, which the minister said “smashed” any previous quarterly records.

Schreiber attributed the surging uptake to growing public trust in the Department of Home Affairs’ reform process.

“This is part of a sustained increase over the past six months, as people ‘vote with their feet’ in support of a more efficient Home Affairs,” the minister stated.

Schreiber said the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) was on track to issue 3.6 million cards in the current financial year, ending March 2025.

That would be an increase of about 28% over the 2.8 million smart ID cards issued in the previous financial year.

MyBroadband assessed the DHA’s Annual Reports since the launch of the smart ID card for a comprehensive view of the smart ID card rollout.

We found the only other year in which the department issued more than 3 million cards was 2018/2019.

The DHA has already issued more cards in nine months in the current financial year than in all but four of the years since the card was launched.

The progress is important as the smart card is intended to completely replace the green ID book.

The latter is several decades old and lacks proper security features to counter modern forgery technologies, making it a major target for identity thieves and fraudsters.

The smart ID card offers greater durability and security features like an embedded microchip that securely stores the holder’s details for offline verification.

The table and graph below show the number of smart ID cards issued annually and the total number issued by the end of each financial year.

Big unknowns about end of green ID book

Home Affairs had originally planned to phase out the green ID book sometime between 2018 and 2022.

However, it has not yet rolled out the live-capture systems needed to process smart ID card applications to around a third of its branches.

It is difficult to determine exactly how close the department could be to announcing a timeline for invalidating the green ID book.

Its last estimate was that there were 38 million of the old documents in rotation by 2013.

If one deducts the 27.23 million ID cards issued by the end of 2024 from that number, roughly 10.67 million remain.

If the department continued its momentum and issued a similar number of cards in the coming years, the original target would be reached by 2028.

However, relying on the outdated 38 million number would be ill-advised considering a variety of factors.

Firstly, over the last 12 years, several million additional green ID books have been issued at DHA offices that are not equipped to handle smart ID card applications.

As of October 2024, only 204 of the 323 DHA branches in the country had the live-capture system required to issue smart ID cards.

The DHA’s Annual Reports showed that between 2013/2014 and 2017/2018, a further 3.77 million green ID books were issued.

However, the number decreased drastically year-on-year from the introduction of the smart ID card, plummeting from about 1.79 million to 266,194 in those five years.

Unfortunately, the DHA has not shared data on new green ID book issuances since 2017/2018, so calculating the number currently in rotation is impossible.

Secondly, many of the 27.28 million smart ID cards issued up to December 2024 were to first-time applicants.

These cards would not have replaced any of the 38 million estimated green ID books in rotation in 2013.

For example, in the 2021/2022 financial year, 966,068 of the roughly 2.37 million smart ID cards issued were for first-time applicants.

That means that only about 1.4 million green ID books were replaced during that year, not counting the impact of the new green ID books issued over the same period.

Unfortunately, the department has only shared the number of first-time smart ID applicants in two financial years.

If the roughly 40% proportion of smart ID cards issued to first-time applicants in 2021/2022 applies to the total over 12 years, then nearly 11 million smart ID cards would have been for first-time ID holders.

That means only about 16.37 million green ID books have been flushed out of the system — less than half of the target of 38 million.

Lastly, millions of green ID book holders have likely died since the last estimate, which would reduce the number of books that need to be replaced.

MyBroadband asked the DHA for a revised estimate of remaining green ID books but the department did not provide feedback by the time of publication.