Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber unveiled his plans to transform the Department of Home Affairs into a digital-first, world-class institution, Cape {town} Etc reports.
Also read: Visa backlog sees overtime approved for Home Affairs officials
Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club on Tuesday, Schreiber said South Africa’s government institutions were either ‘actively hollowed out or, at the very least, allowed to slowly decay’ due to corruption or neglect.
‘For far too long, political leaders have been disinterested in doing the hard yards of institutional reform, instead lurching from one crisis to the next in the hope that populist soundbites would fix our accelerating problems.
‘What we have experienced in South Africa for too long, is a form of institutional vandalism. Instead of maintaining and enhancing them, we have allowed our public entities to be stripped away, piece by piece, like the railway tracks at Transnet,’ he added.
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Schreiber emphasised the need for digital transformation to overhaul the department and redefine government operations in South Africa, highlighting how years of corruption and neglect had severely undermined public institutions, including Home Affairs, leading to a state of disrepair and inefficiency.
‘A department where systems are offline too much, where queues are long, and where the space for human discretion allows organised syndicates to commit the most egregious forms of corruption,’ he said.
‘Our vision is to take an antiquated, paper-based, manual, vulnerable and demoralised organisation, and turn it into a modern, user-friendly, automated, secure, world-class and – most importantly – proud – institution that delivers dignity to all.
‘At the heart of turning this vision into a reality, will be an end-to-end digital platform that processes all applications, adjudications and communications between the people of South Africa and their Home Affairs department.’
He added that secure profiles for every citizen and every person visiting South Africa will be created using existing facial and fingerprint recognition tools such as Face ID and fingerprint functions.
‘Firstly, if we get this right, it would eliminate the need for anyone to physically visit a Home Affairs office for routine transactions.’
He said this would transform the working environment for staff and devote them to the more pressing cases, such as underserved communities, people living in rural areas, South Africans who do not yet use smartphones or the more complicated cases that need more resources to resolve.
He also outlined the process for applying online (onto a risk engine built on the latest machine learning technology) whether for an ID, a passport, a certificate, or a visa.
Once submitted, the technology will:
- Check that the application is complete
- Verify the authenticity of the user
- Analyse supporting documents for fraud
- Run facial recognition on uploaded photos and cross-reference with various databases
- Process cashless transactions
- In the case of a legitimate application, communicate the outcome to the user
He added that all of this would be done in seconds.
‘No more standing in queues, no more waiting months or years for an outcome, no more being kept in the dark about the status of an application, and no more space for officials or syndicates to solicit bribes for a transaction to be processed.’
Furthermore, he said IDs and passports could also be delivered directly to applicants, ‘exactly like we already do in the banking sector with debit and credit cards’.
He outlined an example of this process: ‘A tourist from a country like China – which registered over 100 million outbound trips last year of which only 0.093% came to South Africa – would receive a digital bar-coded visa in both PDF form and in their smartphone wallet within seconds after submitting a legitimate application.
‘When they arrive in South Africa, their full biometrics would be captured at the airport within seconds to enable a track-and-trace system from the time they enter to the time they depart.
‘No more interactions with foreign missions, no more mountains of paperwork, and no more space for human discretion and corruption.’
Schreiber also noted how he envisions a modernised Home Affairs, inspired by the successful digital system used by the South African Revenue Service (SARS).
SARS’s platform quickly checks submissions and spots issues, delivering instant results.
He noted that while past efforts like the Smart IDs were promising, they weren’t fully developed due to state capture but he now sees a chance for Home Affairs to progress and become a top digital organisation.
‘A reformed Department of Home Affairs would secure our national sovereignty by restoring the integrity of our population register and bullet-proofing our civics and immigration systems against corruption.’
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Also read:
Some Home Affairs branches still plagued by 2Mbps connections
Picture: Misha Jordaan / Gallo Images
