Michael Bleby
31 July 2008
Johannesburg — PEOPLE dread visiting the home affairs office. Pity, then, the staff who work there every day.
The head office of the department in charge of IDs, passports and birth certificates is in a drab industrial area on the outskirts of Pretoria East, opposite the SPCA and down the road from a drivers' licence centre.
Perversely, the building manages, on a cool and bright Gauteng winter day, to be both dark and warm. Dark squares in a regular two-three-two pattern guide inhabitants along corridors in a manner reminiscent of old-style psychiatric wards.
The gloomy head office block matches the despair with which most South Africans view home affairs.
For the past year, however, director-general Mavuso Msimang, has been doing his best to change that.
It is unclear whether that best will be good enough when it comes to cracking down on one issue -- passport abuse. Time is critical.
Officials stress the need to strengthen the system from the ground up, by closing the gaps for abuse in birth registration that in turn allow for abuse of IDs, which in turn make passport abuse easier.
The UK, on the other hand, has given SA until the end of the year to get its house in order or lose the status that gives South Africans an automatic visa-free six-month stay in the UK.
"You can go down to Johannesburg central taxi rank and obtain a passport at the drop of a hat," says one British diplomat .
"We estimate 1000 non-South Africans enter the UK illegally on South African passports each year.
South African passports are the third-most-abused documents detected at UK ports."
In 2004, national police commissioner Jackie Selebi said "boxes and boxes" of South African passports had been found in the home of an al-Qaeda suspect in London.
In January, UK authorities said a trafficking racket that had shipped thousands of Indian nationals to the UK used illegally obtained South African passports.
Sitting in one of the brighter rooms at home affairs' Waltloo building, acting deputy director-general for civic services Vusi Mkhize explains the problem. "If a birth certificate is sold to someone else... it then compromises the integrity of our documents, because out of the base document, the birth certificate, people can then get an ID, people can then get a passport."
The late registration of birth system, designed to make up for apartheid failures -- black South Africans only got a birth certificate with an ID number after 1996, Mkhize says -- is particularly prone to abuse.
Late registration allows people to register their birth even decades after the event.
Problems occur, however, because supporting documents such as school reports and affidavits are easily faked.
Mkhize says discussions with UK officials about passport abuse have centred on making the "inputs" secure.
"In a nutshell, they understood it was more the process, rather than the output, because the document itself is not necessarily substandard in terms of being forged easily or whatever," he says.
It is natural for the department to focus on fixing holes in the system that produces 2,1-million ID books annually.
These documents, which let people work, get welfare benefits and take out credit, have a larger domestic affect than the 900000 passports issued each year.
And while passport production is largely automated and secure, IDs are open to abuse. Mkhize declines to say how many fake or illegally obtained IDs are in use, saying it is "difficult to quantify".
He says, however, that before the turnaround started, IDs were wide open to abuse.
"It took about 80 handovers to process an ID," he says.
The department wants to eliminate human steps and remove repetition.
It is making a paper-based system largely electronic. The department has also rearranged the way officials work.
Head office staff are assigned a batch of IDs to oversee to completion.
A "track and trace" system is designed to tell who is processing a document at any given time.
Since July last year, ID production has been reduced from an average 127 days to just under 80 days. The goal is 40 days.
Tenders are under way for the much-delayed smart card that will replace the green ID book, Mkhize says.
UK officials support the overall restructuring, but say it may not work fast enough.
"We have deadlines to meet," another UK source says.
They also criticise the South African government for dragging its heels elsewhere.
Cutting down on illegal documents would be easier if SA set up a web of airline liaison officers -- officials stationed at ports of entry and exit to help airline and immigration staff spot shoddy documentation. The UK has a network of such people around the world . SA does not.
"They have been promising to establish such a network for several years, but nothing has actually happened," the first source says. "We're hopeful the visa waiver test will galvanise action."
The other crucial area is corruption. The department did not respond to a request for details of action taken against corrupt officials, but ministerial spokesman Cleo Mosana said last month "more than 200" had been suspended or fired since September last year.
One of them was Mkhize's predecessor, Joel Chavalala.
Mkhize says a vital part of improving the situation at home affairs is to get staff buy-in.
This means keeping them up with developments and making them believe the changes are not designed to catch them out but to protect them.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
