Home Affairs doesn’t hate you. It’s worse than that

Fin 24 – 19-04-2022

Instead of being at the heart of a functioning state, Home Affairs has been a joke, for a very long time. The consequences cannot be more serious, writes Helena Wasserman.

Here’s a South African story (privileged edition).

My son turned 16 and we decided to apply for an ID and passport.

Trying to avoid the long queues at Home Affairs in Cape Town, we travelled an hour to a nearby town to apply for his documents there. We arrived at 06:00, where a line of freezing people, including many mothers cradling newborns who needed to get registered, were already waiting in the dark.

After more than five hours in line, we found out that his application was in digital purgatory – because we started the process online via a bank, Home Affairs couldn't finalise it. Or something like that.

We applied to have the online application deleted, waited a couple of weeks, and then drove to the town again, this time making sure that we were in the queue long before 06:00. After another few hours in line, the application was finalised.

In less than a week, we got a notification that the passport could be collected at Cape Town Home Affairs. We never received official confirmation that his ID was ready.

Life in line

During the school holidays, we would drop our son in the morning, where he would stand in the "collections line" for eight hours. Every day, hundreds of people waited outside the doors of Home Affairs. When the office started to close in the afternoon, scenes of utter desperation played out, where people - who have travelled far and have been waiting for the entire day - would push to get closer to the front doors, frantic to be allowed in.

One afternoon, after the line didn’t move at all for a few hours, a Home Affairs official emerged with the news that one of the two computers for collections wasn’t working and the other had to be rebooted every time a collection was made, so it was also taken offline so it could be investigated. When asked why there were only two computers to service hundreds of people, he lost his temper.

This was the closest to communication we got from Home Affairs during those days of queueing. There was no ticketing or booking system, no way of knowing whether standing all day in queue would be in vain.

At times it almost felt like Home Affairs was waging an active, hateful campaign against its citizens, but of course the truth is worse than that: there is complete indifference.

From what we could see, there was no indication that any part of its bureaucratic machine was aimed at making things easier, especially for those most vulnerable.  

School term started, and my son returned to wait in line after school. It soon became clear that he would never get inside the building before closing time. In the end, we had to take him out of school, twice, before he finally got his documents.

In all, to get an ID, he stood in a queue for 28 hours.

We were extremely lucky.

We didn’t have to travel that far to Home Affairs, and could afford to return, repeatedly. We even had the resources to go to another town where there were shorter queues. Importantly, also, for us the ID and passport are nice-to-haves – while tens of millions of South Africans are dependent on these documents for social grants, their sole source of income. (Also, in truth, the 16-year-old had the time of his life in line, talking soccer with strangers during school hours, and loving all the drama and wild rumours about what was going on inside the building.)

While from the outside it looks like Home Affairs is suffering a new and serious breakdown, it has always been a source of misery (and the butt of endless jokes) among its citizenry, even as we have done our bit. Apart from enduring impossible queues, almost R9 billion of taxpayer money goes to Home Affairs - the biggest chunk paid on salaries - and the amount has been rising in recent years. This, while the number of ID smart cards issued every year have fallen since 2018, and despite recurring IT system failures, the department couldn’t get it together to appoint a chief information officer for more than six years.

Its shortcomings have serious consequence for especially its poorest citizens, who depend on it for everything from their income, getting a job or a vehicle licence, and gaining access to education and writing matric exams. 

And now, of course, its dysfunction over many decades has played a key part in creating our current xenophobia crisis.

Lawless immigration environment

Home Affairs is supposed to provide a legal pathway for those from other countries who want to settle here. But it has failed.

Take for example, applications for permanent residency. Despite a massive backlog, Home Affairs simply refused any applications since March 2020 until January this year. So, for almost two years, there has been no legal route to apply to stay in the country. (Also, just for appeals in the refugee application process, there is a backlog of 123 500 people.)

Over many years, with its lack of a functional, affordable system to grant work permits or legal leave to stay in South Africa to Africans who don’t have priority skills – along with its failure to govern our border posts - Home Affairs has contributed to a lawless immigration environment.

Knowing there is basically no legal route open to them, people from other countries have established their lives here over decades in the only way open to them: without documents.

Now, the police are hounding them for papers government knows full well they were never able to get.

They have also become an easy ticket for political parties and vigilante groups – who lack the imagination to come up with real solutions to structural problems – to round up populist support.

It is rich of President Cyril Ramaphosa to condemn xenophobic attacks, while his government just stood by as the department failed at its task of providing immigrants with a way to make a legal life here for many years.

It should be at the very heart of a functional state. Instead, Home Affairs has been a joke - for a very long time. The consequences cannot be more serious

www.samigration.com