The Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomes the announcement by Minister of Home Affairs, Aaron Motsoaledi, that the re-issue of identity documents, solemnisation and registration of marriages, amendment and rectification of documents, late birth registrations and application and collection of passports will resume today 4 March 2021. It was further announced that eHomeAffairs services will open on Monday 8 March 2021.

However, recent revelations in Parliament of the wholly inadequate action on the queue chaos outside Home Affairs offices have raised the question of why this ANC government does not take service delivery to South African citizens seriously.

On 21 January 2021, the Democratic Alliance called for urgent measures to manage snaking queues outside Home Affairs offices with no social distancing. In response to a parliamentary question by DA Shadow Minister of Home Affairs Angel Khanyile MP the Minister indicated that only the Eastern Cape was being provided with any intervention. The other eight provinces have seen no action on this issue. The approach of the Minister to take no action and hope that the problem might go away indicates that he is out of touch with the level of anguish Home Affairs lack of service levels is causing.

The so-called ‘war on queues’ is proving to be a losing battle following revelations that Home Affairs has no dedicated and trained queue marshalls despite summarily closing services due to COVID-19 risks. More alarming is that the solution proposed for the Eastern Cape is to deploy untrained EPWP workers to manage queues. Clearly, the Minister believes that the ability to do the job is not a requirement for the deployment of cadres.

The Minister, yesterday, avoided a DA Parliamentary question posed by Adrian Roos MP asking what client satisfaction measures would be implemented to ensure that training under the Home Affairs training academy was having the desired effect - better Home Affairs services. This is a sure sign that there are no client satisfaction measures and that this is of no interest to the leadership at Home Affairs. Millions have been spent over the last decade on Batho Pele training that was supposed to train Home Affairs officials to treat citizens with dignity and respect and provide a better service - let's be honest this training has clearly failed.

The excuse of connectivity issues of Mobile Units is wearing thin. In 2019 the Minister had indicated that this matter was being finalised but the lack of progress to date shows a lack of interest in reaching citizens in rural areas.

The DA calls on the Minister to energise Home Affairs in the service of citizens and ensure that measures to manage queues are implemented in all nine provinces.

 

Issued by The DA