Honourable Chairperson
Minister of Home Affairs Dr. Aaron Motsoaledi
Members of the Executive
Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs, Hon Mosa Chabane
Members of the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs
Acting Chairperson of the IEC, Ms Janet Love
Director-General of the Department of Home Affairs Mr. L.T Makhode and your entire Management Team.
CEO of Government Printing Works,
Commissioner of the BMA,
Fellow South Africans,
It is always an honour and with a sense of great pride and duty to address this occasion which deliberates on the allocation of resources by the Department of Home Affairs to its key programs. The deliberations on the allocation of resources in a form of a budget vote, contributes extensively in ensuring that the limited resources make a great impact towards improving the lives of the people.
These resources will give a new born child their first form of identity and belonging to our great nation. These resources will continue to protect the identity of millions of South Africans. These resources chairperson will open gates to the world to millions of South Africans who continue to travel the world. These resources will give access to identity documents to our young people allowing them to grow and fulfil their dreams. These resources are important for all of us to live our lives because without these documents we become invisible.
The Department of Home Affairs carries the responsibility to ensure that no South African under any circumstances suffers the scandal of invisibility. This we do by managing Citizenship and Civil Registration. Chairperson, our commitment, resolve and ability to respond even in times of crisis was put to the test during the floods that ravaged KZN, Eastern Cape and other parts of our country.
Thousands of citizens were affected by the floods and more than a thousand lost their enabling documents. We had the responsibility to respond to this crisis in order to normalise the lives of those affected by having to speedily issue enabling documents to the victims allowing them to rebuild their lives.
In order for us to respond to the crisis, we deployed 9 mobile units which have serviced 41 sites. We serviced 2 224 citizens for Smart ID Card applications and issued 349 birth certificates on the spot. The re-issue of both Smart ID Cards and birth certificates were at no cost to citizens understanding that this was and still remains a disaster situation. It is blatantly untrue that we have not serviced those affected by the floods in KZN, in-fact we have done so and we will continue to do so.
The disaster situation also displayed the capabilities of our mobile units to service people in areas in which they live taking both application and issuing of enabling documents. Our mobile unit fleet has proved to be effective in reaching out to far flung areas and in order to provide services to people who are unable to visit our offices.
We are currently operating a fleet of 100 mobile units which also provide support to high volume offices and offices under distress. In the past financial year the budget allowed us to conduct visits to 2 056 sites. This fleet has been able to service 131 164 clients and school learners with smart ID card applications in the 2021/2022 financial year. This resulted into citizens saving thousands to rands in travel costs that would have been incurred had they gone to our offices.
The 2021/2022 budget allowed us to procure additional 10 mobile units which are ready for deployment. We will be procuring a further 15 mobile units in the 2022/2023 financial year. Through the mobile units we are better placed to reach out to areas where there is little or no Home Affairs footprint, especially in rural and remote areas. The mobile units are also the backbone of our school Smart ID Campaign which has benefited both urban and rural schools.
Using mobile units we have been able to target learners ensuring that South African learners doing grade 12 sit for their examinations already in possession of a Smart ID Card. We have now also placed focus to grade 11 which saw the number of learners starting their grade 12 without identity documents reduced from 8 187 in 2020 to 2 560 in 2021 academic year.
In the period we visited 1011 schools working in partnership with the Department of Basic Education. The additional mobile units purchased and the ones to be purchased in the new financial year will extend our reach and greatly enhance our school ID campaigns.
This budget chair will allow us to further our efforts in issuing Smart ID cards to our citizens. I am pleased to announce that by the end of the 2021/2022 financial year, more than 19 million South African citizens had been issued with smart ID cards. The replacement of the old green barcoded ID books with the new smart ID cards initiated in 2013, remains on track, with milestones set for each year.
Chairperson the 2021/2022 budget allowed us to issue a total of 2 369 172 smart ID cards surpassing the targeted 1,6 Million. This was despite the limitations imposed on operations by the Covid-19 pandemic and its management and preventative measures.
Of the smart ID cards issued, 966 068 were for first-time applicants comprising mainly of the youth. It is a significant improvement compared to the 622 539 issued to first time applicants in the previous financial year. It is indicative of the impact we are making in the lives of young people of our country. This we can never do chairperson without the resources and the budget that we are deliberating upon today.
The budget allocation for the financial year 2022/2023 has allowed us to increase the planned issue of Smart ID cards with 37.5% which is 600 000 more than the previous financial year which means that in the 22/23 financial year we will issue 2.2 Million Smart ID Cards to citizens attaining the age of 16 years and above.
We continue to make steady progress towards universal birth registration. We strive to build a credible, accurate and secure National Population Register (NPR) with a single point of entry, within the first 30 calendar days of birth. In 2021/22, we had set a target of registering 700 000 births within 30 days.
We however surpassed this target by registering a total of 1 018 718 births, of which 800 057 accounting for 78.5% were registered within 30 calendar days. This percentage is up from 73.7% of the previous financial year. We intend to normalize early birth registration at above 90% by the year 2024.
Part of the strategy in this regard is expanding our office footprint in health facilities, in order to bring Home Affairs services closer to the people.
In this way parents can register their children before leaving the hospital or health facilities – a service which is more convenient than planning a visit to Home Affairs at a later stage. This service is rendered in partnership with the Department of Health.
The number of registration sites where births were registered during the review period was 803, consisting of 412 Home Affairs front offices and across all 391 health facilities.
Currently, there are 391 Home Affairs Civic Registration Offices in health facilities. Our country has 1 445 health facilities with maternity wards and our plan is to ensure that the Civic Registration capabilities exist in all of them. The health facilities connection are funded through the revenue we generate from issuing enabling documents and other activities which were negatively impacted due to Covid 19.
The positive impact of the health facilities is demonstrated by the 42.3% of births registered in 2021/2022 which were done at health facilities which is an increase from 33.4% in 2020/2021. We anticipate that the numbers of birth registration in health facilities will increase in the current financial year.
Chair we are making progress in strengthening our partnership with the banks in support of the rollout of the smart ID card and the machine-readable passports. We currently have 28 bank branches connected to the Live Capture system to enable online processing of smart ID card and passport applications.
Our clients need customised and personalised services due to the unique nature of their needs hence our technology must respond to such unique needs. We have clients with names that have special characters, fingerprints that are damaged by years of physical labour, amputees due to medical or accidents and many other challenges.
It is our duty to ensure that our systems respond to such individuals irrespective of their challenges hence we continue to enhance our technology to have multimodal biometrics like facial recognition.
The 2022/2023 budget will see us exploring new ways to better service citizens. We will procure kiosks that will allow clients to self-service for passports and smart ID applications and reprint birth, marriage and death certificates. The kiosk will be designed in the manner that will require authentication through biometrics and will be located in strategic areas to allow access even after office hours or weekends. The self-service Kiosk will usher a new era in the manner in which we service our clients.
The recently piloted Branch Appointment Booking System that the Minister mentioned earlier is proving to be the solution in as far as dealing with the management of queues. The Branch Appointment Booking System can be accessed by clients through the Home Affairs website and is web based.
It provides citizens with the ability to book the dates and time slot of their choice and is linked to the national population register for additional security. The rollout of the system will follow a phased approach and 43 large offices will have the system by 30 June 2022 and 120 medium offices will have the system by 31 October 2022 and 34 small offices by 30 November 2022 and the remaining offices will continue as walk in services.
The Branch Appointment Booking System pilot currently operates on a hybrid model in the 25 offices that we have rolled in because we didn’t want to turn away clients that have not made a booking and it is only used to book for applications of passports and Smart ID cards only.
In the future we would like to only service booked clients for those two products because it is our firm belief that scheduling an appointment for those two products is possible compared to scheduling a death or birth registration because those are occurrences that are not planned for in advance hence we will continue to take walk ins for those two services. The citizens will be able to access the Home Affairs website link to schedule an appointment on their desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
We are exploring partnerships with more institutions and are in discussions with the South African Post Office to extend accessibility of our services.
We are also exploring opening offices in the major shopping centres in which we envisage a positive uptake, with five of the malls having offered rent-free space for five years.
I would like to appreciate the work that continues to be done by our National Youth Forum. The Home Affairs National Youth Forum continues to be a pillar of support in improving service quality. The Home Affairs Youth Forum in the previous financial year conducted outreach programmes with other youth sectors in government and in the NGO sector. In this area, a key activity for this year is the National Youth Imbizo. They have also led the weekend volunteer program where specific offices are opened to service learners and the youth over weekends.
Chairperson, we have the responsibility to ensure that the budget is managed in a responsible manner that is free of corruption, a budget must do what it is meant for that derives value for money. We are pleased that the department achieved an unqualified audit result in respect of the 2020/21 financial year.
This was the fifth successive unqualified audit opinion for the department. Matters preventing the department from achieving a clean audit outcome are the impairment of receivables and accrued departmental revenue. We do acknowledge that there is still more to be done in improving the departments audit outcomes but our ability to maintain an unqualified audit opinion means we are taking correct steps in the right direction.
In conclusion;
Through our collective commitment and resilience, I believe that the vision of a modern, secure Department of Home Affairs that strategically delivers its full constitutional mandate is within reach.
Already there are pockets of excellence. As you may recall, at the height of the Covid-19 lockdown, our front offices were confronted with extraordinarily long queues. The East London large office is an example of our commitment to improve service delivery.
By voluntarily starting work at 6 am along with a few innovative measures, the Office Manager, Mr Alie van Heerden, and his team have managed to turn things around.
On a normal day, public members are served swiftly and efficiently, and the sight of long queues is no longer a problem for this particular office.
I invite Honourable Members who visited that office a long time ago to go there now and see how the situation has improved.
There are many other examples that we can give of officials who go beyond the call of duty. We wish to applaud all of them for the good work they are doing.
I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to the Minister, the DG and the entire management team of Home Affairs for continuing to working tirelessly in steering the ship. We must remember that our task is never to point to problems but our task is to resolve the complex problems.
I would like to further thank the Chairperson and Members of the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs for their steadfast support and counsel over the years. Through their continued oversight and valuable guidance, together we can build a future-fit Home Affairs department.
I thank you.
