The home affairs department is forging ahead with plans to introduce a smart-card identification system, home affairs minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said today.<\/p>\n
“It is clear to us that we have to move in this direction as quickly as possible,” she told a media briefing at Parliament.<\/p>\n
While some aspects of the home affairs national identification system (Hanis), such as electronic document tracking and the automated fingerprint identification system (Afis), had already been successfully introduced, the smart-card ID was still to come.<\/p>\n
When the green bar-coded ID was introduced some years ago, there was a view that this would help integrate the various existing documents in the country at the time, and ensure a single document was issued to all South Africans, she said.<\/p>\n
“But we also believed that in introducing the home affairs national identity system, one of the things that process would do would be to sanitise our population register.<\/p>\n
“When we talk about sanitising, I think that every country has the responsibility of ensuring there is a continuous process of cleaning up the population register to ensure that undesirable elements should not find themselves in the population register of any country. So that’s what I mean by sanitising.”<\/p>\n
However, the department had discovered that it might not have been done in the manner in which it had thought it would be done.<\/p>\n
“It may not have achieved the desired result of sanitising the population register.”<\/p>\n
The appropriate route to follow would be to move towards introducing a smart-card and developing an in-house capability for this.<\/p>\n
The department’s senior management was investigating the possibility of developing a capacity in SA to produce such a smart-card.<\/p>\n
“We need to develop this capability and there’s also agreement that we will then launch it as a pilot [project] to a small group of people in the beginning. We’re talking about 2008 for the pilot,” Mapisa-Nqakula said.<\/p>\n
The department was currently gathering information relating to the status of technology, costs of producing the card, capability of producing the card internally versus externally, and developing a logistical strategy.<\/p>\n
The results of this exercise should be published by mid November and a report made to the political principles by January, the department said.<\/p>\n