Corruption within the Home Affairs department has rendered South African identity documents suspect internationally, Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said on Monday.

"We can no longer be sure whether the person in possession of a South African passport is 100% South African," she told journalists at the National Press Club in Pretoria.

She said regardless of the new security features in the new passports, some countries still demanded a visa because a South African passport was not secure enough.

"We have a lot to clean up in our population register".

As part of the clean-up campaign, she said there was a need to minimise late birth registration.

"We need to change our birth certificate to [for example] include the details of the mother. The current birth certificate only reflects the name of the child and a number."

She said a discussion was on as to at what age should children's fingerprints be taken and stored in a data until such time applied for an identity document (ID).

When such a child applies for an ID, only the fingerprints need to be pressed in an identity machine to identify him.

Dlamini-Zuma said another aspect of minimising fraudulent issues of passports and IDs, was to issue IDs at high schools to children of 16-years-old and above.