Goodbye to stepping foot in Home Affairs in South Africa

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber says the department wants to create a digital platform that would eliminate the need to physically visit a home affairs office.

Schreiber said that the department’s vision is to transform a paper-based, manual, vulnerable organisation into a modern, user-friendly, secure, and automated institution.

At the centre of this vision is an end-to-end digital platform that will process all applications, adjudications, and communications between South Africans and the department.

This platform is said to ensure that every function Home Affairs provides will be available online to every South African citizen via a secure portal, which would be similar to online banking portals that have become widespread throughout South Africa.

“Through the simple use of existing facial and fingerprint recognition tools, including the Face ID and fingerprint functions we all use every day on smartphones, we can create a secure profile for every citizen and every person wishing to visit South Africa,” said Schreiber.

The Minister said that if the department gets this right, anyone needing to physically visit Home Affairs for routine transactions will be eliminated.

He said that this would also transform the working environment for its staff by allowing them to do their existing jobs well and engage in far more exciting and productive tasks.

“This would include devoting our staff to serving those who truly need it most, including the poorest members of our society, people in rural areas, the 10% of South Africans who don’t yet use smart devices, and those exceptional or complicated cases that require more resources to resolve,” he said.

The recently appointed Minister also explained how the system would work.

After an online application for an ID, passport, certificate, or visa is submitted, a risk engine built on machine learning technology checks to see if the application is complete.

It will also verify the user’s authenticity, analyse supporting documents for fraud, run facial recognition on uploaded photos and cross-reference with various databases, process cashless transactions, and communicate the application’s outcome to the user.

Schreiber said that this would take place in a matter of 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.”

“Once we have this in place, there is also no logical reason why we cannot offer a service where IDs and passports are delivered to the door of the applicant anywhere in the world – again, exactly like we already do in the banking sector with debit and credit cards,” he added.

This is not the first time that the Minister has called for a digital transformation. He previously stated that he wants Home Affairs to follow the example of the South African Revenue Service (SARS).

The South African tax collector has embraced digital transformation, helping it reestablish itself as one of the best-run state entities in South Africa and one of the most efficient tax authorities in the world.

The Minister also previously said that he is fully confident in the government’s ability to turn things around at Home Affairs, citing the clearing of its visa backlog of applications as an example of the department’s ability to get things done if it’s focused and works collaboratively.

With the visa backlog now 50% cleared, the department is on course to have it fully cleared by December 2024 after more than a decade of it building up.

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