Changes coming for Home Affairs in South Africa – including more services through banks

Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi says that the long lines at offices are a result of the large number of people the department serves, with home affairs responsible for providing services to both South African citizens and non-citizens.

Responding in a recent parliamentary Q&A, Motsoaledi said that other reasons for long queues at Home Affairs offices include:

• High client volumes and unpredictable walk-ins;
• Limited staff capacity to meet service demands;
• Inadequate office space;
• Concurrent of the manual and automated process;
• System instability;
• Discontinuation of Saturday working hours.

As part of the strategy to deal with long queues, Motsoaledi said that the department is moving some of its services out of the front offices to other venues:

• Registration of births and deaths will move to health facilities.

• Mobile trucks have been deployed to schools to capture first time applications in nine provinces.

• In collaboration with banks, the department has installed a live capture system to 26 bank branches in South Africa which has the capacity to capture both Smart ID Card and Passport applications.

Motsoaledi said that the department has also introduced queue marshalls/floorwalkers to ensure that people visiting our offices adhere to the Disaster Management Act by keeping social distancing, wearing masks and sanitizing as and when they enter front offices.

Discussions to extend bank services

In April, Motsoaledi said that the government was in discussions with the country’s banks to extend services.

“Most people who are well-to-do have bank accounts (and) should not come to Home Affairs offices. We want to increase the (banking rollout) very fast so that most South Africans can get their ID or passports through the bank.”

All of South Africa’s biggest banks – with the exception of Capitec – offer the E-Home Affairs service at a handful of their branches.

Absa, FNB, Nedbank, and Standard Bank have had multiple branches supporting the service for several years. Discovery Bank and Investec Bank recently started participating in the programme with one branch each.

The tables below show all of the bank branches where you can book appointments to capture biometric data for your smart ID and passport application, and collect your documents when they are ready.

Absa

Discovery

FNB

Investec

Nedbank

Standard Bank

Read: Massive Home Affairs delay blocks skills, wealth and investment from settling in South Africa: experts