Minister Leon Schreiber’s home affairs @ home campaign, with its unassailable endgame of improving the integrity of our country’s immigration system, may sound like music to our ears, but one could be forgiven if it sounds like a remix of an old government track.
After all, South Africans bought what former department of home affairs (DHA) minister Malusi Gigaba was selling when he pledged to create e-Home Affairs as part of the process of going paperless and taking our country’s custodian of our identities into the digital era in 2016.
We all know how that ended, which is why Schreiber’s campaign sounds almost too good to be true. There is no doubt access into and out of South Africa has for too long been a blight on our society with misrepresentation and fraud at home affairs posing major challenges to the country.
Most recently the thorny issue of fraud and identity theft linked to the mother of former Miss South Africa contestant Chidimma Adetshina, who subsequently withdrew from the competition, highlighted the magnitude of the problem in the department
But the spectre of imminent danger to our nation was laid bare when 95 Libyans were arrested at a suspected military training base in White River, Mpumalanga in July, ostensibly legally in the country on study visas. Mercifully this story didn’t play out as the Libyans intended and there was a happy ending as they were sent packing — which brings the matter full circle in honing in on the integrity of SA’s immigration system.
By August 19, the DHA said it had cleared 50% of its backlog of 306,000 visa and other permit applications in three months and are now on a mission to fully eradicate the backlog by Christmas.
Schreiber attributes the success to collaboration with public service and administration to veto overtime — the project involves a team of 60 home affairs officials in an auditorium who were given permission to work overtime with nothing on their agenda apart from clearing the backlog.
His rationale is to create breathing space required to “undertake systemic reform and digital transformation ... to improve service delivery and attract the skills, investment and tourism we need to create thousands of new jobs”.
The benefits of working together as a team when finances are short and needs are long has potential in yet another DHA initiative — efforts to close our “porous” borders which facilitate the influx of illegal immigrants and goods into the country.
It's a no-brainer and the benefits of digitising crucial services — without having to pay a bribe or wait for months — involving every milestone in our lives are endless
Schreiber says Border Management Authority (BMA), which control port health, immigration control, access control, biosecurity, food safety, phytosanitary control, and land border infrastructure at all 71 of the country's land, air and maritime ports of entry is woefully underfunded by almost R4.5bn over the next three years.
So he turned to another avenue for funding — the department of constitutional development and justice — for the release of R500m from the criminal assets recovery account after its request for a R2.9bn allocation for the 2023/24 financial year was turned down by National Treasury and only R150m was approved.
This was used to buy specialised capital equipment, including patrol vehicles, firearms and ammunition, communication devices, body-worn cameras, surveillance equipment, forensic technology, motion sensors and drive-through vehicle/truck scanners.
It's not rocket science that the return on investing in technology has multiple payouts — satellite surveillance systems and drones for detecting immigrants illegally entering or existing, ramping up national security and improving efficiencies at all ports of entry.
There have been slow and steady successes in rooting out dodgy employees:
- former home affairs official Judy Zuma was recently sentenced to an effective 12 years in prison for passport corruption;
- former DHA employee Tony Stout was sentenced to five years in prison on nine counts of fraud and nine counts of contravention of the Identification Act;
- the DHA’s counter-corruption unit — in a joint operation with the Hawks’ Pretoria commercial unit, SAPS digital forensic investigations, crime intelligence and Akasia public order policing — pounced on Emanuel Baloyi for creating fake green ID books and;
- a Free State DHA official was arrested for passport fraud involving a Bangladeshi national.
But it is technology that is the gateway to stamp out fake ID books and passports, long queues and corruption which have been entrenched in the DHA system for decades. It's a no-brainer and the benefits of digitising crucial services — without having to pay a bribe or wait for months — involving every milestone in our lives are endless.
The synergy it requires from existing partnerships means users will be able to apply online through a secure platform linked to their unique biometrics, in the same way that banks and the South African Revenue Service already verify transactions for bank cards and vehicle licences.
And it has implications for tourists, who Schreiber says can look forward to paperless visas in the form of electronic travel authorisation using biometrics. And more tourists, we know, will mean job creation and improved investor confidence which in turn unlocks our economic potential.
While he may be a new broom sweeping clean in the government of national unity, his track record thus far is gaining traction and for the sake of things to improve at home, he needs to get his house in order.
South Africans cannot afford to kow-tow to the corruption that enriches a few, nor can we be gullible to the promises of our politicians. Now more than ever it is up to the people to demand the end to the oppression by holding our leaders accountable.
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