Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen of the media, just to apologise we are a little bit thin on the ground. Most of my team led by the Director-General (DG) are in Cape Town to brief the Portfolio Committee on our strategic plan. We will however be joined by the Deputy Director-General (DDG) for Civic Services, Vusi Mkhize. Otherwise it is just myself.
I thought we should review what we said at the beginning of this administration when we met you for the first time. We then said there were certain things we said we wanted to do so I thought i should brief you on these areas. And then just to give you a glimpse of the way forward for the department in the coming year.
I think we should just remind ourselves that Home Affairs is a very complex department but mostly we have two main areas of responsibility: one is in the area of civics and the provision of enabling documents from cradle to grave. The other side is immigration which ranges from visas, permits for businesspeople and others, refugees, ports of entry, so these are the main issues. Of course we also have the Films and Publications Board as an entity and we have the Government Printing Works, simply because we are their main client. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is a chapter 9 institution although they receive their budget through the department. We are responsible for defending their budget, and also for putting their legislation through the various stages. Even though they are independent, we in a way, house them.
When we first met, we had identified one of our priorities as getting our population register in order and that the only way we could do this was to ensure babies are registered at birth to ensure there is only one point of entry to our population register. If this could be achieved, we will avoid a lot of the problems we are facing at the moment. We also said it was our priority to ensure that everyone who was 16 years and above received an identity document (ID) document. I will deal with these and then I will come to other things.
So, we then set out to do this. But what we needed was to get this into the national psyche, the national consciousness that the registration of babies is required by law because in the past Africans were not really encouraged to register their babies so most African people were not aware that there was a law obliging them to register their babies within 30 days of birth. We needed to get this into the national consciousness and that at 16 years old you must get an ID.
So we began a campaign which began in 2009 but was launched in March last year by the President. That campaign aimed precisely to get these messages into the national psyche of the country but also to go out and assist people because our footprint is not very wide. It is still mainly in the cities. We need to use our mobile offices to assist expand our footprint. Whilst we were doing this we met with a lot of challenges and we then decided to establish what we call Stakeholder Forums in every municipality which will work with us. It consists of councillors, representatives of civil society, and other departments. In the rural areas it also consists of chiefs and so on. This helps us a lot to mobilise people so they know our mobile trucks are being deployed but also to provide an oversight role. So, we benefit as Home Affairs from their help but they also tell us what they think we should do better. We have now covered 90% of the municipalities with these forums and we find them very useful.
And then we quickly realised that we also need to expand the footprint of where people can register babies. So hospitals were then connected to the database of the department. We now have 189 hospitals connected to our database. Therefore women in these hospitals are able to get their birth certificates online, before they leave the hospital. But of course, 189 hospitals around the country is not a lot. We will therefore be rolling out the connectivity to other hospitals. But were hospitals are not connected we have Home Affairs staff who go and collect the forms from the mothers, process them in offices and bring birth certificates to the mothers. We have found this very useful. Just to show you how effective this has been, we will take last year’s results:
- 499 957 babies were registered within 30 days (more than 50% which we believe is a great achievement)
- 456 675 babies were registered between 30 days to 1 year.
We think therefore that we are getting there. 130 284 were registered after one year but before 15 years old 190 091 were registered after 16 years old – these is far less than we have previously dealt with in terms of the late registration of birth. So we think we have done well. We are not where we should be – where we should ideally be is that at least 80% of babies are registered within 30 days of birth. We think that all these processes have helped – hospital connectivity, the outreach programme, and the stakeholder forums.
On the issue of IDs, we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Minister of Basic Education to give us access to the schools so we are able to ensure that we can issue IDs to those who turn 16 years old. The majority of the children who turn 16 years old will still be at school. We can also ensure that those who do not have birth certificates can have them. We are happy to say that last year, we were able to issue IDs to first time applicants - 1 091 511 sixteen year olds and above received IDs for the first time - 257 000 more than in the previous financial year. We therefore feel that this is also working.
The part that is not working so well is the issue of ensuring South Africans look after their IDs – South Africans still lose their IDs – last year alone we had to print more than 1.3 million IDs to those who re-applied. This was even more than first issues. What is even more disconcerting is that more than half a million of these were not collected. This means that people probably misplace their IDs, go to reapply and when they find their original ID, they go not come back to us to collect the re-issued one. This is quite wasteful in terms of time, money and also opens up possibilities of corruption because you have IDs hang around. It also opens up the possibilities for duplication – because if someone steals my ID which has not been collected and rips off the photo and replaces it with theirs, it is two people using the same number. We again plead with South Africans to look after their IDs.
I will come back to what we think should happen in the medium to long-term regarding IDs.
When it comes to passports we are continuing to produce our very highly secure passports but we had hoped that we would have by now rolled out the online capture for the production of passports. I will come back to this later because it is important that we implement this for the future.
And then in terms of immigration – I must say that in the last two years we paid more attention to civics because this was one of the biggest problems.We have also tried to increase our footprint by opening more offices and we are trying to improve our existing ones. Last year we were able to refurbish about 30 offices and we have been able to introduce in 13 offices the queue management system. You receive a card when you come into our offices and receive attention when it is your number. There is therefore no need to panic but what is more important is that we can look at a dashboard – we can measure in real time for instance, in the Kyalitsha office, how many people are in the queue, how many have been served, how long it took so we can indeed improve our services. We have done this but we will continue to improve our offices and roll out the queue management system. The only reason that we cannot do it at once is because of financial constraints. So we will take it step by step according to the budget we have.
When it comes to immigration, we are going to be paying more attention to immigration this year. In the previous years, you know that our priority was the FIFA World Cup and ports of entry and indeed we were able to, despite many challenges, implement an enhanced Movement Control System at 34 of our largest ports which account for 99% of those who come into South Africa. We are going to roll this out to the remaining ports.But we have as a cluster decided to rationalise the ports because once we have rationalised them we can roll out to the rest. But the rest account for a small proportion of movements through South Africa. The FIFA World Cup went well. We were able to stop some people before they embarked at foreign airports so they did not enter South Africa at all. This system was able to interact with our database, the South African Police Service (SAPS) database and the Interpol database. It is certainly very helpful.
Of course, we are part of a broader government, so as part of government’s New Growth Path, we will ensure that tourist visas are facilitated more easily. So we will look at our visa regime in relation to our tourist policy as well as where the largest volume of tourists come from. We will have to make sure the visa regime is easy or even waived.
When it comes to job creation, we are going to be training a lot of required skills to supply the economy. But we know that training of skills takes time, it cannot happen overnight. So we are going to create an environment where scarce skills can come into the country more easily. Already students are issued with visas for the duration of their studies rather than having to renew it every year. We are also going to be facilitating businesspeople who want to come and invest in South Africa and especially the following skills - engineers - civil, chemical, electrical, mechanical – agronomists, suitably qualified artisans, scientists, senior project managers, environmental experts, information communication technology (ICT) specialists, economic planners and others.
These are some of the skills identified. For those with scarce skills we may be able to give them visas for 4,5 years and sometimes even permanent residence rather than them having to come to us on an annual basis to renew their permits.
We will continue to work with other members of the cluster to ensure that, for instance, criminals and problematic elements are prevented from entering South Africa. We have centralised the permitting system in preparation facilitate those scarce skills.
We continue to have a lot of challenges with people who enter South Africa illegally. They land in neighbouring countries legally by air and then when they come to South Africa they cross without going through our ports and claim they do not have documents. We are dealing with this and we will be putting this onto the Southern African Development Community (SADC) agenda because we cannot deal with this on our own.
We said we would establish a strong anti-corruption unit.It has been established. We will have to increase capacity – some results are being seen with the arrests. We will continue to work on this.
But going into the future – you know there was a bit of a hiccup for technology in the department but we have resolved this now. We had to stop the contract – if not we would not have had a successful FIFA World Cup. We have now resolved all the problems. We are going to be working with South African Revenue Service (SARS) and other service providers to ensure we can do three main things:
- Roll out the infrastructure for live online capture – so everything will be captured online – we will begin with passports and once we are done with this we will move to the IDs.
- Once we have done this we will begin working on the smart card – we do not want people to have to bring photos to us in the department. Once we have a smart card, we think that people will lose their IDs less because it is easier to look after.This will assist us to deal with many challenges including corruption, inaccuracies in data capturing and so on.
This is what we are going to be doing moving forward.
We are also going to be streamlining our refugee processes. What has delayed us in some of these instances is that we had to look at the law – some of the laws had to be amended – we have now amended the Refugees and Immigration Acts. These are in the parliamentary process and are almost finalised. The Births, Marriages and Deaths Act has been amended as well as the Citizenship Act. There were things we could not do without amending the current legislation. We are now busy with the regulations. The regulations will be published by June.
This is in short where we are. We have had to deal with the abnormal situation of Zimbabweans who had come into South Africa before 2009. But on our side we are on track and on course. We have given the Zimbabwean government and their citizens until July 2011 because we cannot issue permits to those without passports. We hope the Zimbabwean government will therefore be able to produce all the passports required. For us our cut-off date is August, because if the last passports are produced in July we will have to finish the process in August and we hope this will be behind us.
We will also be upskilling our immigration officers, putting them through courses so they can improve their skills levels.
This is what I can say about what we have done and what we are prioritising in the year ahead.
Questions and answers
Question: Minister, are you aware of how many Zimbabwean applications have been adjudicated if the cut off point is to be August 2011?
Answer: I do not have the figures now but what I do know is that long before June we will have finalised the adjudication of all applications in our possession. What we will be waiting for is the passports for each application. Already we send a sms to say the permit is ready although the person does not have the passport yet. What will therefore delay us are the passports from the Zimbabwean government.
Question: Minister, how serious is this problem of the non-collection of IDs?And also, what is the department doing to encourage those who have submitted applications to collect their IDs.
Answer: The number that I gave earlier was just for those who had applied last year. But in total we are sitting with just over 750000 uncollected IDs.So, it is a very serious matter. We even did some research around Pretoria – so we called and asked people why they had not collected their IDs. The most common response was that they had found their IDs. About 5 million people have more than one ID. There are different reasons while people need more than one ID although we must accept that there are those who genuinely lose their IDs.
We must get this into the national psyche – also that this is a very expensive exercise. Now, as I said in my budget vote, government has asked us to cost and people should pay for just the basic cost of the document if they need a second one. The first one is free.But if you want a second one, you will have to pay.
This is a serious problem and we hope that from time to time the media will assist us to popularise these messages – ie. People must look after their IDs.Mothers must also register their babies within 30 days.
Question: Minister, in terms of job creation, how many people will the Department be employing to alleviate some of the backlogs in the department?
Answer: Well, our responsibility is obviously that we must facilitate skills coming into the country. This will be our biggest contribution to the Growth Path.
In terms of how many people we are going to employ, DDG Mr Mkhize can tell us how many people he will be employing – I don’t have the other figures because the rest of my team is not here – in the civics area we will be employing an additional 1 300 people this year as part of this drive.
Question: Minister, what happens to IDs that are not collected? If the re-issued one my legal identity document?
Answer: Well, in reality, the latest ID replaces the original one. It’s just that most people and places do not check if the current one is your latest copy. Some people have more than one copy which they use interchangeably. But legally the latest one is the one that should be legally accepted.
Question: Minister, what do you do when you get married – do you pay for that ID if you have changed your surname?
Answer: Well, nowadays you have a choice about changing your surname. You are asked when you get married whether you would like to change your surname. Yes, you pay because you choose whether you want to change your surname. You pay for that choice.
Question: Minister, you also talked about the anti-corruption unit – is it a stand-alone unit that services only the department or is it linked to SAPS, NPA?
Answer: Though it is located within the department it collaborates very closely with SAPS and crime intelligence as well because we need to be able to arrest those who must be arrested and discipline internally where necessary, or both.
Question: Minister, what happens if I lose my ID because my house burnt down?
Answer: We have always replaced documents free of charge if people have experienced disasters – floods or fires, etc. We replace whatever documents they have lost and we will continue to do this.
Question: Minister, regarding hospital connectivity (inaudible)
Answer: Well, they are all over the country.Hospitals that have been linked are also all over the country. What has been impacting on our connectivity is that in some hospitals they do not even have a place where we can set up an office. Some of the hospitals do not have proper connectivity because we need this to link up to our server. Some are in the rural areas. We feel that even if hospitals are not connected in these areas, those in rural areas must not be disadvantaged – this is why we deploy Home Affairs officials to these areas to collect documents, process them and provide birth certificates to the parents. As soon as we can connect such hospitals we will do so.
Question: Minister, with Local Government Elections a month away and the usual scurry for documents – are you confident this will not happen this time?
Answer: Yes, in the two registration weekends we worked very well and as you would have noticed, there has not been a huge ID campaign because we have been running this campaign for the past two years. During the voter registration weekends we were open for the same duration as IEC voter registration stations so that we could assist South Africans. We will also be open on the day of the elections to assist people who may have displaced or lost their IDs and if they require temporary IDs.
Question: Minister, (inaudible)
Answer: It costs approximately R140 to produce an ID, excluding the human hours – this is just the production.If you multiply this by 750000 it amounts to a large amount of money.
Question: Minister, when will you be introducing the smart cards?
Answer: We hope we will be able to start the roll out in the 2012/13 financial year. This is why I am saying we will be rolling out the live capture because we do not want to introduce the smart card without the live capture. Of course, the roll out will also take time because millions of South Africans have IDs. We will therefore have to introduce the smart cards in a controlled and systematic manner. We must have a system. If we do not do this we may have millions of people coming to our offices.
We will use this year to introduce the live capture and pilot the smart card. We have already done a pilot with the crew member certificate because our pilots and cabin crew need a sort of smart card when they travel. We are producing this. It is the same principle as the smart card. We know that we can do it but we must introduce the systems. Had we not had challenges with the technology, we could have introduced it this year.
Let’s cross the bridge of the costs when we get to it.
Question: Minister, regarding illegal immigrants entering South Africa – are these mainly from SADC countries or a wider spectrum?
Answer: Now we are getting people from across the seas – east, north, Europe, Asia mainly. It is not just SADC nationals. But also for SADC really there is no need for this because there is no visa requirement besides with Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is therefore no need for people to enter South Africa illegally. This is why we want to introduce this on the SADC agenda because countries must ensure their nationals have travel documents and they should not be jumping the fence if they are coming to South Africa.
But what we are seeing more of is that nationals from elsewhere land in neighbouring countries and enter South Africa illegally. This means they are consciously entering South Africa illegally. This is a conscious decision. They are not refugees. If they wanted to enter South Africa legally they would have flown to South Africa and not flown to a neighbouring country and then entered South Africa illegally.
Question: Minister, (inaudible)
Answer: In a way yes. But we have also been very fair because we ran a campaign for two years so people could get their IDs.We are doing this together with National Treasury since they had asked us to cost the production of IDs and passports. They are now no longer subsidising IDs that people are losing. We costed the process and Treasury accepted the proposal. This was gazette in January. We still said we would not implement it immediately because it is an election period and people require IDs to register and vote. We wanted to ensure that those who wanted to register had their IDs. We are therefore only implementing this now. We tried to ensure that every South African who wanted an ID could get one. And those who do not have birth certificates will get their first IDs free anyway.
