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The Democratic Alliance (DA) yesterday visited the Home Affairs refugee centre, which has recently relocated from Nyanga to Maitland. It became apparent that while certain improvements have been made, security officials were still running the show and massive absenteeism was crippling the department.

After initially being refused entry to the building at both entrances, access was finally gained and the following discoveries were made:
• It appeared that more security guards were on site than Home Affairs officials. They commanded more respect from refugees and were even processing Home Affairs papers. This indicates that security guards are still running the show. (see picture below)
• The security scanning equipment was not in operation and was only wheeled in after I arrived as a member of parliament. (see picture below)
• Out of 13 fully equipped ‘Refugee Reception Office' stations, only 3 were manned by Home Affairs officials.
• Out of 21 ‘Refugee Status Determination Officer' stations, only 9 were manned.
• While some Home Affairs officials were wearing their nametags, there were a number of others who weren't.
• The filing system was in a complete state of disarray as the moving company had combined ‘processed' files with ‘awaiting attention' files causing complete chaos and resulting in refugees having to wait even longer for their files to be found.
• Most of the refugees in the queue complained that they had arranged appointments, which were not met, and they were forced to stand in the queue outside the building yet again.
• In an attempt to perform crowd control, security officers were using pieces of rope and poorly marked cardboard signs to create some form of queuing system (which was clearly not working).
• Asylum seekers claimed that there were multiple queues when a single queue should have existed for each process.
• As eager and helpful as the handful of national youth service employees were, it was unclear whether they were vetted to handle sensitive personal documents.
• The three officials who have been suspended on corruption charges have not been replaced (resulting in more strain placed on other officials)
In a portfolio committee meeting held on 15 September 2009, Mr Jackson Mckay, Deputy Director-General: Immigration, misled the meeting by claiming that the new refugee centre in Maitland was being refurbished to have the correct layout. However, it was made clear yesterday that construction on the new building has not even begun. We were informed that the existing building needs to be knocked down before construction on the new building can begin, which means that there is no possible way that the new office will be completed by December, less than two months away. The refugee centre is temporarily accommodated in a warehouse behind the new location. It was recently revealed that it will take the Department of Home Affairs at least 30 years to clear the backlog of asylum seeker applications that has built up in just over 10 years since government introduced its Refugee Act in 1998. The DA will use parliamentary questions to determine what the Minister of Home Affairs plans on doing to address high absenteeism as this is clearly crippling the department and only going to cause further delays in processing asylum seeker applications.