Johannesburg — THEY sign you up when you're born, they sign you off when you die, and in the years between, their confirmation of your existence is a condition of just about everything you might want to achieve. At least that's the theory, but for many, the failures of the people at Home Affairs block the path to health, wealth and even education. It's one of the biggest government departments. For the millions not riding the wave of globalisation-driven growth, it is one of the most critical.

Yet it has consistently defied every effort to make it helpful, effective and efficient.

Anecdotal evidence is almost universally negative -- mostly stories of rudeness, indifference and inefficiency.

The Department of Home Affairs is also judged the most corrupt, after the South African Police Service, in most surveys. More than 240 officials have been sacked in the past two and a half years, but independent analysts say that is a fraction of the number of officials actively complicit in corruption.

A multi-departmental rescue plan was launched at the request of Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula in July. Headed by Public Service Commission Director-General Odette Ramsingh and including officials from the Treasury and the Department of Public Service and Administration, an intervention team is assessing the department's processes and performance over the past five years and just beginning to breathe life into the notoriously moribund operation.

Ramsingh's initial reports suggest they have a long way to go.

"Managers have not yet recognised that they need a 'business unusual' approach to evolve at a quick pace, as is evident in the sense of comfort and inertia at management level. There is no sense of urgency and a lack of adherence to deadlines," she told Parliament's portfolio committee on Home Affairs in August.

Getting branch offices onto a computer network is one of the key requirements, but Ramsingh reported that even the IT department, usually among the most motivated in any company, had lost the plot.

"A question arises as to whether the Information Services branch understands that ICT is one of the key enablers for organisational improvement and process innovation within the department," she said.

Ramsingh said senior managers had been appointed without due process and sometimes despite the fact that they lacked the required educational and other qualifications.

Ministerial spokesman Cleo Mosana said Mapisa-Nqakula had called for help after Auditor-General Shauket Fakie issued a disclaimer on the department's books -- the strongest censure he can impose.

"We need to review the structure of the department in its entirety, but right now we're looking for some quick wins and we're working to develop the excellence that we have," she said.

Fakie's recent report on the department's management reflected an organisation in total disarray, but one whose managers seemed indifferent to its slow collapse. After years of yellow cards, Fakie delivered his fiscal red this year with the disclaimer.

Fakie described how officials filibustered for seven months, dodged seven formal requests for specific information, falsely blamed auditors for losing records and eventually dumped boxes of unsorted files and documents at the feet of the auditing team.

Patrick Chauke, a member of Parliament's Home Affairs committee since 1994 and its chairman since 2002, spelt out the simple but devastating effects of the department's inefficiencies:

•In rural KwaZulu-Natal, a mother travels hundreds of kilometres to the nearest Home Affairs office and sleeps on its doorstep so she can queue from dawn to get the death certificate she needs to bury her son;

•A father waits two years for an identity book so he can begin the search for work but, when it arrives, key details are wrong. Encouraged by the department's own "get it right" campaign, he returns and applies again. It comes back months later with exactly the same errors; and

•Parents wait months or even years for the documents they need to register their children for child support grants or for school. Until applications have travelled to Tshwane and back -- at high risk of getting lost -- lives are on hold.

"In South Africa, everyone is a client of Home Affairs," Chauke said in an interview this week. "The minister is trying her best, but what is still lacking is to galvanise the senior managers. They are not pulling their weight."

Julian Pokroy, chairman of the Law Society's Immigration and Refugee Law Committee, says the Department of Home Affairs is also failing the business community, throwing up new obstacles to the recruitment of scarce skills, while the government's Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, Asgisa, is pulling in exactly the opposite direction.

Former Home Affairs Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi put an inventive recruitment facility in place, based on the actual needs of the economy, Pokroy said. This was reversed by legislation last year to reduce from three to two years the period for which senior executives of multinational companies could be seconded to South Africa and by limiting their options to stay longer.

The department also failed last year to renew the annual declaration of scarce skills, making it impossible for companies to import desperately needed talent between July last year and February this year. When it was published, the list appeared unrelated to actual needs.

"We don't know where this list is from. It certainly isn't from us, but we ... are the ultimate employers and we should have been consulted fully and properly as to what is actually needed," Pokroy said.

He said the current list made no provision at all for the recruitment of doctors, medical specialists or nurses to replace the scores who leave every year to earn pounds, dollars or euros.

Pokroy said he and colleagues had informally listed 20 consequences of the department's inability to issue identity documents promptly. This could impede access to social grants, education, medical care, a bank account, a job or a passport.

Chauke admits to frustration as Home Affairs teams arrive to brief MPs every year with a new plan to transform the department, to tackle corruption, improve efficiency and make its services a right rather than a favour. Now he is worried that the imminent departure of Jeff Maqetuka, the department's fifth director-general in a decade, will set the transformation agenda back even further.

Mapisa-Nqakula announced recently that Maqetuka would resign early next year. Officially, he asked to be reassigned, but insiders say he was persuaded to quit as the effect of his indecisive leadership began visibly to erode the small gains made since Buthelezi's 10-year management of the department ended in 2004.

"The new DG arrived in the middle of a turnaround programme and I think he could not understand the plan ... He came up with a new plan of his own. If we divert from every plan every time there is a new DG, we will keep going back to zero," Chauke said.

Sandy Kalyan, the Democratic Alliance spokesman on Home Affairs, said: "As political head, the minister must take responsibility for the non-performance of her top officials, but she is trying to get better people in and make sure they are up to the job."

The department was designed under white rule to underpin the social-engineering project that was apartheid. Its primary function was to keep white areas white and to restrict "surplus" black people to the 10 homelands. It was about "state security", not service.

Buthelezi was given the job of transforming the department after 1994 and came up with many innovative and potentially effective solutions. But his plans were not hatched in the caucus of the ruling ANC and their devolutionary trend was in conflict with the ANC's centralist tendencies.

Frontline services stalled as Buthelezi battled with former intelligence chief and presidential adviser Billy Masetlha, who was sent in by President Thabo Mbeki as director-general.

Buthelezi wanted to devolve key duties to municipalities and tried to make Masethla implement the plan. The ANC was not about to see a key department made redundant, however, and blocked the IFP leader at every turn.

Buthelezi is long gone from the department. Its continuing failures cannot be blamed on apartheid, or on him, for much longer. Mbeki needs to choose the next director-general carefully, and find a man or woman with the credibility and strength to redesign and revive the department that makes every South African real.