Home Affairs hiring 10,000 IT graduates
16 February 2022 – Mybroadband
The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) will appoint 10,000 young IT workers to help speed up the digitisation of its paper records over the next few years.
President Cyril Ramaphosa mentioned the recruitment drive during his State of the Nation address on Thursday, 10 February 2022.
It forms part of an extension of the Presidential Employment Stimulus programme.
According to Ramaphosa, this programme has thus far supported over 850,000 work opportunities, primarily for young people and women.
“This includes over half a million young people appointed as education assistants, making it the largest youth employment programme ever undertaken in our history,” Ramaphosa stated.
The Presidency provides a detailed dashboard on the overall achievements of the programme to date, including its budget and the number of beneficiaries that have been assisted.
So far, a total of R23.6 billion in funding was allocated over two phases, with more than 673,514 jobs created, 40,399 of which were retained.
One of the next important roles of the employment stimulus is to enable the DHA to recruit 10,000 unemployed young people to digitise its paper records.
Ramaphosa said this would enhance their skills and see them contributing to the modernisation of citizen services.
President Cyril Ramaphosa (left) and Aaron Motsoaledi, Minister of Home Affairs (right)
Home Affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi told eNCA the first group of employees would begin their work from May 2022.
The full complement of 10,000 employees would gradually be brought on board in the months after that.
The DHA started the process to digitise over 280 million records in 2016. These include births, deaths, lineage, ID, passports, and migration, dating back to 1895.
That number has since grown to over 300 million records.
Because of the sheer volume of data, the process was taking too long, Motsoaledi explained.
“Sars was doing the digitisation, but unfortunately, we only had a budget to do 5 million per year,” he stated. “At that rate, we were going to take 60 years to get digitised.”
Motsoaledi reiterated that the recruits would be young people with qualifications in IT, either from a university or TVET college.
“They will know what they are doing,” he stated.
As a result, he expected the project could be finished within 24 to 36 months, depending on the budget granted by National Treasury.
Recruitment process
The minister has also assured that the recruiting process would be above board.
“There are going to be no favours, no corruption, no crony-ism or any of the things that people used to complain about,” he stated.
DHA will be taking applications from all nine of the country’s provinces, and many of the workers will be staying in their own provinces.
“They will be earning a stipend which is quite good, I must say, but we don’t want them to waste that money looking for accommodation, transport, etc.,” Motsoaledi stated.
The minister said a press conference this week would provide more details on the requirements and application process.