Rude, unhelpful and unfriendly`: Home affairs booking system has Western Cape citizens seething
• The Department of Home Affairs launched a new appointment booking system last year.
• But citizens in the Western Cape have complained about poor service delivery and communication.
• It appears that the website may also have been affected by glitches in the past.
Ten months after the Department of Home Affairs launched a new online appointment booking system at select offices across the country, South Africans have described `chaos` and poor service delivery at branches in the Western Cape.
The department launched its Branch Appointment Booking System (BABS) in May last year.
Many people who spoke to News24 recently complained that the system discriminates against citizens who don`t have access to computers, smartphones and the internet. The primary complaint is that whatever system is in place is not being communicated to people ahead of time.
After witnessing about 100 people waiting in the sun and hearing numerous complaints, News24 couldn`t find one official to explain what system was in place at the Barrack Street office in Cape Town on Friday, 3 February.
Jill Francke arrived early one morning and waited in what she thought was the correct queue for an hour, before being told she was in the wrong line. She was forced to the back of another queue.
`There was no way of knowing which queue we were supposed to be [in], so only then did we discover there are queues for identity documents, passports, and temporary identity documents.`
Francke said she had been queuing for five hours and described home affairs department staff as `rude, unhelpful and unfriendly`.
Kaylin Snyman complained about queuing for almost eight hours to apply for a new identity document, while accompanied by her diabetic mother. Her mother - Veronica Pietersen - said she paid R10 to rent a chair for four hours to sit down.
Eileen Dyson, 65, described how she spent four hours queuing one Tuesday without being helped. She returned to wait in line once again for seven hours.
She said:
I`m unemployed, but every time I must find R50 travel money to get into town and back home again.
A man waiting outside the Barrack Street office, Patrick van Niekerk, complained that no one had communicated what steps they should follow.
`Other people have arrived and been allowed in immediately, but there is no ticket system, so we don`t know what`s going on.`
Officials at the office weren`t able to give News24 much information on what the standard operating procedures were.
`It`s not fair`
One manager indicated that they had `sent the van to assist with the queue`.
A van was indeed parked outside the building, but the occupant wasn`t assisting anyone and declined to respond to any of our questions.
Back at the office, another manager refused to explain what system was in place, but provided News24 with an A4 page subtitled `Waging a war against long queues`, which explained the `Branch Appointment Booking System (BABS)`.
Similar scenes were described by people queuing in Stellenbosch and Somerset West.
A Somerset West pensioner - who preferred to remain anonymous - described the `terrible experience` she had standing outside in the heat for six hours to collect a passport.
She said:
I can`t understand why I must wait for long because all I needed to do was collect a passport.
`It`s not fair on the people that wait in the queue from 05:00. They go early to get help, but then others who have booked online get attended to within minutes.
`What about the thousands who cannot book online?
`And when there is load shedding, everything is off, while you have to stand for two hours, and when load shedding is over, then the computers have to reboot, which takes another hour.`
Online gremlins
There also appear to be problems with the online booking system.
A woman identifying herself as `Lisa of Cape Town` wrote to the minister on the People`s Assembly website in August last year about glitches on the home affairs department website:
`Your website is absolutely terrible! It has been since we were told to use the online booking system. Myself and friends and family and neighbours and random strangers fight every single day to firstly get the website to actually load, then secondly, when it does, you log in and click next, then the website gives an error of `Service not available`, then you try again, and the website does not load.`
Department officials declined to respond to questions or were unavailable.
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