Newly appointed Home Affairs Minister Dr Leon Schreiber has announced that South Africa’s Smart ID cards and passports will be updated with enhanced security features in the coming years.

Schreiber announced the development in the Department of Home Affairs’ 2024/2025 budget vote speech on Monday.

“Both the passport and smart ID card will be refreshed and updated in order to enhance the security features of these documents, with the aim of building trust by more countries and organisations worldwide,” said Schreiber.

While Schreiber did not provide a specific date for the changes, he said the documents would be updated “during the current administration”.

Barring an unprecedented early election, the current administration is set to serve until the next general elections in 2029.

Although it is unclear what security shortcomings the Smart ID card might have, the South African passport’s vulnerability to fraud has been widely reported.

Former Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsaledi recently lamented the impact of passport fraud on South African travellers.

“Every single South African is a victim because we are now forced to apply for visas when we visit countries such as the United Kingdom (UK),” Motsoaledi said. “This was not the case before syndicates like these denigrated our passports.”

“We will, therefore, have no mercy to anybody whatsoever, Home Affairs official or outsider, who gets involved in these dastardly acts. We are doing so to protect the interests of all South Africans”.

Motsoaledi’s comments came after the sentencing of a Pakistani national for corruption and bribing of twelve Home Affairs officials in Krugersdorp to assist in producing fraudulent passports.

The syndicates typically create fraudulent documents using the identification information of recruited South Africans who are unlikely to travel abroad and willing to sell their identities.

When the applicant’s photo needs to be taken, the corrupt officials help to swap them out with the foreign national.

With the photo featuring the face of the actual criminal using the document, border officials are unlikely to flag them as forgeries.

One controversial attempt to mitigate this practice was a decision by low-cost airline Ryanair in 2022 to screen South Africans with an Afrikaans-only general knowledge questionnaire on the country before they could board its planes.

The issue not only left non-Afrikaans speakers feeling ostracised, but several Afrikaans speakers also found the questionnaire’s questions too difficult.

Before scrapping the measure following severe backlash, Ryanair described it as an “additional safety assessment” to confirm whether they were correctly documented before travel.

“As language proficiency is the least intrusive further safety assessment method, this questionnaire is conducted through Afrikaans, one of South Africa’s most prevalent official languages,” the airline said.

Good news for naturalised citizens

Schreiber also shared good news for naturalised citizens who have not yet been able to apply for Smart ID cards for more than a decade.

The minister said that support for Smart ID cards was gradually being phased in, with 280 cards already issued and another 697 in progress.

“Once the system has been adjusted to verify compliant applications, all naturalised citizens will be able to visit any Home Affairs office equipped with live-capture facilities to apply for their smart ID cards,” said Schreiber.

Schreiber is a member of the Democratic Alliance, which has long pushed Home Affairs to enable Smart ID card support for naturalised citizens.

Smart ID cards have primarily been restricted to locally-born citizens since they were launched in 2013.

As a result, naturalised citizens who have lost, stolen, or damaged green ID books must visit one of only a handful of offices that still support the issuing of the older document.

The DA argued that this infringed their rights as citizens.

The issue could have become more serious if the department proceeded with its plan to declare green ID books invalid.

Home Affairs only announced it started a pilot of Smart ID card issuing to naturalised citizens in December 2023, in a parliamentary response provided to DA MP AC Roos in March 2024.