George Eliot is accredited with posing the question: ‘What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other.’ It appears that someone at Home Affairs missed the ‘George Eliot Day’ during their studies.

Amidst considerable fanfare it was announced very recently that the backlog for permit applications had been cleared, a story that the media carried repeatedly, to the considerable delight of many a frustrated expat waiting for his or permit. When more than one attorney subsequently pointed out to the Department that this was not exactly correct, officials directed their attention, ironically, to the ‘small print’ of the full media release.

And there buried in the detail was the advisory that people should not start hassling the Department for their permits before 20 April, to allow the Department time to get the permits from Pretoria to Johannesburg and for administrative matters to be attended to. Quite aside from what is it that takes three weeks to get done once the application has been adjudicated, and how long it takes a courier to get from Pretoria to Johannesburg even in rush hour traffic, surely Home Affairs could have timed their announcement better or even just corrected those apparently misleading media reports?

But that small print tells a very different story. Firstly, as far as the client base is concerned, the backlog has not been cleared. It makes no difference to the customer that his or her permit has been “adjudicated” somewhere in Pretoria if it is not in his or her passport. And secondly, advising people not to contact the call centre before then implies that there will in fact be applications that will not have been finalised by that date.

That expectations are going to be frustrated is in fact inevitable. The story is told, for example, that during March, Head Office officials descended on the Johannesburg Regional Office and collected many applications that had been lying there without being sent on to Pretoria. These were removed without allocating ‘track and trace’ numbers to the individual files. As a result attorneys cannot track their clients’ applications. And attorneys active in the field report that they are still being called and told to send duplicates of their applications because the paperwork has been lost by the Department. In one matter where the attorney was trying to track his client’s file, there was an exchange with the call centre that could have been scripted by Franz Kafka. Head Office had already twice asked for a copy of the application to be faxed through to them, which had been done. Then whilst trying to track its further progress, the attorney was told that Johannesburg had not however recorded that the file had left Johannesburg and, until Johannesburg did so, the file was not in Pretoria even if it was in Pretoria and the call centre would not answer questions about the application until that happened!

But there is another side, and very cynical component, to this so-called purging of the backlog. Under pressure to clear the backlog, attorneys are reporting that little short of shocking and irrational decisions are being taken with applications being refused for farcical and arbitrary reasons. That way, even if the application then has to return to the Department by way of an appeal, it is no longer part of the backlog.

The same thing happened several years ago when there was a huge backlog in permanent residence applications and also when there was a back-up in refugee applications. This is not clearing the backlog. It merely creates a new one and people are still kept waiting much to the increasing frustration of the customer and other interested parties such as employers.

It’s possibly too much to hope that the Minister or the Director General reads George Eliot during their spare time.

As a footnote, it was noteworthy that the Department of Home Affairs was not asked to comment on the arrival of Radovan Krejcir’s mother at OR Tambo last week. According to media reports, an ‘anonymous’ security official claimed that airport officials had been “duped” by Mrs Krejcirova having had the gall to arrive on her own passport and without a disguise (presumably her Klingon costume was at the drycleaners). In doing so it was claimed that security officials, with all their training for and experience of the soccer world cup etc, had apparently been sold a dummy – perhaps one of the oldest tricks in the book, whether its chess pieces, football players or contraband you are moving! Personally, I think someone forgot to take his anti-paranaoia medication last week.