Contrary to popular belief, the online system used by Department of Home Affairs (DHA) offices across South Africa can at least function partially — even during periods of downtime.
That suggests that the notorious “system is offline” issue many people are greeted with when visiting a DHA branch might be blown out of proportion and used as an excuse when it is not relevant.
DHA system downtime has often been blamed for significantly disrupting the department’s ID, passport, and other key citizen and resident services.
In response to a question in Parliament earlier this year, former DHA minister Aaron Motsaledi revealed that the department had lost nearly 141,000 working hours between the 2019/2020 and 2022/2023 financial years, primarily due to load-shedding and system downtime.
That number only includes hours lost to producing smart ID cards, with hours lost in other services like passport renewals not shared.
In 2022, Motsoaledi pinned the blame for the “system offline” issues on government’s ICT service provider — the State Information Technology Agency .
Sita hit back, explaining that the DHA had opted for the cheapest possible IT services product with the lowest service level agreement (SLA).
In addition to supporting a measly 2Mbps copper-based connection without backup, the SLA allows for up to 16 hours turnaround time in resolving issues.
A report presented to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications in 2021 showed that 90% of incidents were contained within individual DHA offices due to the vast majority of equipment being outdated.
At that point, only 5% of Home Affairs branches had a backup link. The DHA was also the only major government department without dual communication links to all its offices.
With most of the problems being localised, it makes sense that the DHA has only issued official notices of downtime on its national network on a handful of occasions.
Sita improved its uptime on the DHA’s network to 99.5% in 2023/2024, while the department’s hours lost due to local system downtime continued to rise.
It would appear that actual “system offline” cases — referring to DHA branches being disconnected from the National Population Register (NPR) due to a problem on Sita’s end — are rare.
Slow, outdated equipment and Internet disruptions at the branch level are causing the technical problems.
Passport collections among supported offline services
MyBroadband has learnt that the DHA’s system allows staff to work offline with some services even if the department is experiencing downtime.
When the system inevitably comes back online, it syncs any new information submitted while it was in an offline state.
The most recent major national Home Affairs outage in January 2024 was caused by a problem on the Sita mainframe that affected access to the National Population Register.
The inability to access this system made verifying people’s identities impossible and was no doubt highly problematic.
However, the DHA said it could still provide services like passport collections and issuing of handwritten death certificates for burials while the NPR was inaccessible.
It is unclear why the DHA would allow for offline collections of passports but not ID cards.
We asked the department for feedback regarding specific services that remain available when the system is offline but it did not provide comment by the time of publication.
Perhaps the best course of action for South Africans met by the “system offline” excuse is to enquire and ensure that the particular service they seek cannot be offered while the system is experiencing downtime — locally or nationally.
 Collecting a new passport is one of the services available when the DHA’s system is offline
Home Affairs minister quiet on planned upgrades
Recently-appointed DHA minister Leon Schreiber wants “the system is offline” to be regarded as a swear word and for himself to become known as the “Minister of System Online”.
Schreiber recently revealed that some offices still use 2Mbps lines for connectivity, over two years after Sita first highlighted the issue.
A recent analysis by MyBroadband found that speed to be slower than any entry-level broadband product currently available to home or personal users in South Africa.
Across uncapped fibre-to-the-home, DSL, fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, fixed-wireless, and satellite services, the slowest speeds on the most affordable packages were 4Mbps, 5Mbps, or 10Mbps.
The technology used by the DHA branches — DSL — has nearly been eliminated and replaced by fibre connectivity.
While Schreiber believes that the low speeds could be part of the technical issues experienced by DHA branches, his office has kept mum on specific details of planned upgrades to branches’ Internet connectivity, despite multiple requests from MyBroadband.