The Department of Home Affairs is working on a number of initiatives to cut down on queues in its offices around the country.<\/p>\n
In a presentation on Tuesday (26 November), director-general Thulani Mavuso says the issue of reducing queues at Home Affairs offices has been made a ministerial priority.<\/p>\n
“In April 2018, the Minister directed the department to conduct an assessment in order to develop intervention strategies that will deal with the challenges long queues,” he said.<\/p>\n
This eventually led to the development of the ‘war on queues campaign’, he said.<\/p>\n
“In terms of addressing uncoordinated communication strategies, the announcement of the war on queues campaign will be made through the media,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mavuso says some of the interventions being looked at include:<\/p>\n
Modernisation<\/strong><\/p>\n In July, Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi said that his department is \u2018on a journey\u2019 to modernise all of its backend legacy systems and automate all front-end processes to issue vital documents.<\/p>\n \u201cTo date, the department has automated front-end processes of issuing IDs, Passports, Birth, Marriage and Death Certificates,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe system development programme is ongoing and backend legacy systems are still to be completed to ensure full integration rather than the current multiple interfaces which are not ideal and causes intermittent downtimes.\u201d<\/p>\n Motsoaledi said that the network infrastructure in which all the DHA systems run on is provided for by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and is often a cause of system downtime.<\/p>\n \u201cA comprehensive assessment was done by SITA in the last financial year and produced a new network architecture and implementation plan which will provide a fully redundant and high availability network throughout the DHA footprint,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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