Cape Town, 22 August 2002
Members of the media and representatives of the Diplomatic Corps.
It is a privilege for me and my colleague, the Deputy Minister, to once again address you on some of the salient issues currently being addressed in the Department of Home Affairs and, more importantly, to afford you the opportunity to raise questions regarding issues within the ambit of the activities of the Department which may be of interest to you. My colleague the Deputy Minister will also address some of the issues, which fall under those line functions specifically assigned to her, including the Film and Publication Control Board and the Government Printing Works.
My Department strives to fulfil its mandate with respect to its two main line function activities, Migration and Civic Services, within the context of the vision of Government as embodied in the President's State of the Nation Address and as confirmed at the Cabinet Lekgotla. We strive, within the constraints of limited resources, to continually improve on the services we render and to contribute to a better life for all.
My strategic vision for the reconstruction of the Department of Home Affairs within the context of the overall transformation imperative of Government, is based on three pillars, namely the establishment of a modern migration management system, now encompassed in the new Immigration Act, in the process of implementation; the Home Affairs National Identification System (Hanis), currently under construction, and the modernisation and redesign of the delivery of civic services to the citizenry in line with Batho Pele principles.
Civic services, including identification, citizenship, the Population Register and travel document matters, are by far the most utilised Home Affairs services. In this area, the Department can make a great impact on service delivery improvement and can enhance the quality of life of all South Africans. Yet, it is in this functional sphere where chronic delivery inadequacies and the spatial inaccessibility of services still plague the Department. Limited resources and infrastructure, exacerbated by the historical legacy of their unequal distribution, aggravate the situation. This is notably apparent in deeply rural and marginalised urban communities where the need for civic services is the greatest.
With a view to extending the reach of our services and optimising the deployment of scarce state resources, I have come to the conclusion that devolving the delivery interface of Home Affairs services to third tier government provides the most rational, economic and functional way of confronting the future. This approach is not only fully aligned with the Government's notion of integrated governance but also provides a workable strategy towards achieving service excellence. Coupled with the benefits of Hanis, that has in fact positioned Home Affairs at the cutting edge of e-governance advances, the devolution option presents the only viable strategic direction whereby the interests of all stakeholders and customers will be best served. Moreover, many other countries have introduced systems of devolved and decentralised civic services delivery with great success.
I am aware that the devolution vision is even greater in reform than was the case with migration. The implications thereof extend far beyond the traditional operational sphere of Home Affairs and will profoundly impact on a wide range of governmental structures and their interrelationships. A broadly consultative and collaborative effort must result in the positioning of the Home Affairs devolution initiative at the centre of national, provincial and local intergovernmental structures and their inter-relationships, as envisaged in Chapter 3 of the Constitution, dealing with co-operative governance.
In the light hereof, I have already solicited the support and co-operation of Cabinet and its relevant sub-structures. Moreover, within my Department I have commissioned an in-depth scientific investigation into all matters pertaining to this issue and appointed a task team to drive the process of establishing such a new dispensation. It is with great urgency and utmost dedication that we are moving ahead and I am confident that our efforts will be enthusiastically supported throughout the governmental fraternity and by other stakeholders - as well as, above all, by the South African citizenry at large, who stand to benefit most from the outcome of this process of reform.
Within the Migration sphere the most significant development over the past months has undoubtedly been the enactment of the new Immigration Act, Act 13 of 2002. The Immigration Act is an enormous improvement on the present uncertainty and levels of discretion. It contains innovative solutions, which place South Africa ahead of many other countries that are struggling with issues of migration. The Act brings immigration control into compliance with the highest standards of human rights protection and administrative and judicial review, while placing South Africa on a par with many other countries in respect of many of its provisions, especially in respect of investors' and intra-company transfer permits. We believe that as implemented through regulations, the Immigration Act will become far more user-friendly, without losing any of Government's control responsibilities regarding the movement of people.
The Immigration Act will need to be implemented by means of a broad range of regulations, which are currently being finalised, to ensure that we can make the Immigration Act work at its best and as intended. Once regulations define the elements of the new system of migration control, new forms will need to be designed, printed and supplied to all our offices, while training our officials in their use. Therefore I am not in a position to indicate a clear commencement date for the new system of immigration control, but it is believed that this will take place either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.
In the meantime, to give effect to a Constitutional Court ruling in this regard, my Department has amended its policy relating to lodging work and study permit applications. Foreigners currently legally residing in South Africa on valid temporary residence permits, e.g. holiday permits, may now lodge applications for work or study permits from within the country. Such applications provided of course that they meet all the requirements, can be finalised at regional offices of the Department. In line with the intentions of the Immigration Act we have also started delegating the finalisation of permit applications, inter alia applications for study permits, intra-company transfers and secondments to various Missions abroad, rather than continuing with the time-consuming practice of referring all such applications to Pretoria.
The Immigration Act also does away with the Immigrants Selection Board, which was tasked to adjudicate immigration applications. The period of office of the Board in any event expired on 30 June this year. In future, officials of the Department will adjudicate all applications. This will provide for a speedier adjudication process in view of the rapid increase in the numbers of immigration applications that we have received in recent years. It will also reduce, if not eliminate altogether, the recurring backlogs that we experienced with regard to immigration applications. There are currently a number of applications that await finalisation and I have now authorised that these un-finalised applications can in the interim be adjudicated until the Immigration Act becomes operational.
It is interesting to note that due to the increased co-operation between the Department and the SAPS, the number of deportation warrants issued in respect of foreign persons who have been found guilty of serious crimes, have increased dramatically. Whereas the total number of deportation warrants for the year 2001 was 760, the number for the period 1 January to 31 July 2002 already stands at 630. It must further be noted that despite this increase, the section concerned has, through more efficient practices, been able to cope with a personnel strength that decreased from seven persons four years ago to three at the moment. This is the attitude that the Department needs in its drive to become more efficient.
The removal of illegal foreigners remains a serious problem, and will carry on being a problem as long as South Africans continue to employ illegal foreigners as cheap labour, rather than employing South African citizens. It must be recognised that the current drought and food shortages in our neighbouring countries also have an impact in this regard. In this process the number of illegal foreigners removed from the RSA for the first months of 2002 was 75 572 in comparison to 68 492 for the corresponding period in 2001.
There often seems to be a tendency in the average South African to regard illegal aliens and refugees or asylum seekers in the same vein. This has led to the media referring to various incidents of violence against refugees as indicative of xenophobia amongst South Africans. My Department has been working towards ensuring that asylum seekers and refugees lead a life of dignity. In fighting xenophobia, the Department seeks to ensure that nobody anywhere is subjected to the insult and offence of being despised by another or others because of his or her race, colour, nationality or origin. In ensuring that xenophobia is eradicated within the Republic, the Department is committed to realising the objective that every human being should enjoy human rights and be considered equal, with every right and possibility to build a national home, which they can truly call home. My Department has further committed itself by establishing a working group to deal with xenophobia and produce a document that assists in vigilantly fighting xenophobia, as mandated by the Immigration Act.
Within the other main line function responsibility of my Department, namely Civic Services, the implementation of electronic systems to replace time-consuming manual processes is receiving priority attention as part of our efforts to improve service delivery. Significant progress has been made with two major such projects, namely the Hanis project and Electronic Document Management System (E-DMS).
The Hanis Project comprises three main pillars, namely the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), the Identity Card component and the System Integration components. AFIS is a fingerprint database system that uses complex formulas and algorithms to store the digitised fingerprint data on the database and manipulate it in accordance with the needs of the Department. System Integration sees to the coherence and concerted effort of the various sub-systems, which ensures that they work together to produce the desired results.
The Identity Card component is the unit that eventually emits the identity card. I have announced in the past that we have considered utilising the technique of smartcards. A great deal of thought has been given to how smartcard technology should be implemented. Certain proposals were put forward which I suspected to be problematic in many respects. For this reason, with the approval of Cabinet, I established a commission presided over by Professor Fink Haysom. This Commission worked hard and consulted extensively, and has now finalised its report.
At the same time, we opened an intense process of inter-departmental consultation and we involved in it the National Advisory Committee for Innovative Technology. We wanted to make sure that we made the right technological decision in respect of smartcards and secured the maximum value for money for the State. This process has led to very substantive changes to our original thinking and policies on the matter. These changes will shortly be submitted to Cabinet for its consideration and deliberation, and therefore it is premature for me to discuss their features at this juncture. I merely wish to indicate that this process has been completed and that a relevant announcement will be made after Cabinet deliberations and on the basis thereof.
By expanding the system's Remote Verification service to cater for needs of the commercial sector, the Department is considering rendering a very significant function. This will enable all interested parties, from both the public and the private sector, to query the Hanis database and do reliable verification of those people approaching them for services. In pursuit of this goal, the Department is also considering doing what is called back record conversion, a process whereby all the existing fingerprint data on the manual records will be captured on to the Hanis database.
To obtain the desired volumes and thus ensure that the stress levels of the system are according to requirements, the Identification Subsystem should be upgraded to reach the record intake capacity of 45 000 records per day. The process of populating the Hanis database could start in September 2002. The system must be capable of performing both output functions as well as data intake functions, seven days per week, 24 hours per day, with no down-time or shifting between input and output functions.
Another need associated with Commercial Verification has arisen, namely for the establishment of a Call Centre through which stakeholders can contact the Department for enquiries. The Call Centre will be operational in the third quarter of 2002.
By end of March 2002, R654.8 million had been spent on the project since the signing of the contract in November 1999. Of the R654.8 million, 85% was spent on equipment, 14% on services and 1% on personnel, administration and inventories, whilst R 131.5 million (excluding VAT) has been spent on foreign exchange. Most of the equipment and some of the services are imported and these attract large foreign exchanges as the Rand continues to deteriorate against the US Dollar and the Japanese Yen, being the foreign currencies in which these items are priced.
My Department intends introducing to Parliament within 2002 the Identification Amendment Bill. This Bill introduces the issue of electronic data capturing and verification associated with Hanis, for which the current legislation does not make provision.
Also within Civic Services the Department is implementing the Electronic Document Management System (E-DMS), which will result in effective, real-time, online automated document management from capture to business transaction, thus significantly improving efficient business processes. The system will make Home Affairs records and archiving information available for immediate access to any authorised employee at workstations in the entire system, both nationally and internationally. This system will eventually be integrated with the National Population Register. It can indeed be regarded as the first step towards re-writing the Population Register. The commissioning date for Phase 1 of this project is 1 September 2002. This is a major project that will largely do away with paper records and microfilming and will significantly improve service delivery within the civic services terrain. The magnitude of this project is evident from the fact that, inter alia, 51 million microfilm records have to date been converted into electronic records.
One of the main strategic focus areas of the Department of Home Affairs is the deployment of information technology and systems to improve service delivery to all stakeholders, and these two mentioned projects are indicative of my Department's commitment to realising this strategic goal.
Despite the severe financial and human resource restraints under which we need to function, my Department and I are committed to contributing towards improving the lives of the people of South Africa, inter alia, through constantly improving access to and the quality of services that we render. We will constantly work towards our vision of " Rendering World-class Service".
I thank you.
Issued by Ministry of Home Affairs