The rollout of digital IDs and the modernisation of the department of home affairs will not displace its current staff, minister Leon Schreiber told the Sunday Times this week.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced during the state of the nation address that the department would launch digital IDs to enable the safe and secure use of digital services for all South Africans.
The government would digitise driver’s licences, matric certificates and services at the master’s office, Ramaphosa said. Citizens would be able to fill out police statements online, and eligibility for Sassa grants could be tested remotely.
“Soon, every South African will be able to access many of the services they need without visiting a government office or filling out manual forms,” the president said. “This year alone, hundreds more bank branches will now offer smart ID and passport services, decreasing queues and waiting times.
“We will also work with civil society to ensure that citizens’ protections and rights are safeguarded through this digital revolution.”
Unpacking this announcement, Schreiber said the government was looking to expand its current integrated system with its banking partners so citizens could get secure access to their home affairs data in a way that facilitated their ability to transact and live in society.
“And our job should not be to make it impossible for you to access your own information or, even worse, for someone to steal your identity or engage in the kind of things we see with the green ID book, for example, when people can swap the photos and all of those things,” Schreiber said.
He said digital transformation work would be expanded from 30 branches to around 1,000, which would allow people to apply for smart and digital IDs more swiftly.
“So in the next few weeks — I’m not even saying next year — I’m saying in the next few weeks, we will be launching the first set of these bank branches that will work under this new model. And I think it’s going to blow people’s minds, to be honest with you.”
Schreiber said the programme would have a massive impact on rural people who travel for hours to get to home affairs offices.
The department would bring the same approach to immigration through its electronic travel authorisation (ETA) system, he said.
The first phase of the ETA system was rolled out during South Africa’s G20 presidency to member states whose citizens needed visas to gain entry into the country.
“If you go to OR Tambo or Cape Town International Airport now, at the immigration side, you’ll see the counters that actually say ETA, and if you compare them with the old counters, these new ones have a camera there,” Schreiber said.
“In the first phase, it was only China, India, Indonesia and Mexico, because those are the four G20 countries that need tourist visas if you want to come to South Africa. So we said, you apply online, you scan your passport, you upload a selfie, we check if your passport is fake. We have machine learning technology that will immediately pick [it] up. We check 40 different parameters on your passport to identify whether it’s a real passport or not.”
Home affairs has more than 82,000 applications that have been started on the ETA system, while 3,500 applicants have already arrived.
Schreiber said facial recognition would be rolled out at all ports of entry, with the system becoming a central entry point for any foreigner.
He said digital IDs would bind all the home affairs reforms. The department intends to do away with the green ID books to get rid of fraud.
“In the past, it was all paper-based. It was a mess. But now what we’ve done is we’ve used that as an opportunity to really build the first part of digital ID. You now go onto that portal, you type in your ID number, you upload a selfie, and then we match that information against the population register. In other words, we have a photo [of] you on the population register. We check that your face matches that photo.
“We also check that there are no duplicates or someone who has tried to steal your identity. And then, if you’re a citizen, we are able to tell you immediately, ‘Don’t worry, you are a citizen.’ If you are not a citizen, the magic really comes in there to say [if] you are one of the people who lost your citizenship unconstitutionally. Would you like to reinstate it? And when you do that, you can upload and scan a passport, even from any country in the world where you currently hold a passport.”
Schreiber said there was no risk that home affairs officials would be displaced, as the department was already short-staffed.
“So all the work we are doing now is actually just catching up with that 60% shortfall as a start. Once everything I’ve described is fully rolled out, what we’ve realised is that there is actually going to be a shortage of back-office personnel. We anticipate a huge increase in demand for the smart IDs because, obviously, now a lot of people will have access to them. That requires a lot more hands in the back office to manage cases where we don’t have a photograph on file or where there are exceptional cases where someone’s birth was never registered.
“I think the job in home affairs is changing, but it’s definitely not going away. And we focused a lot on retraining as well. We’re aiming to train over 3,000 officials in this financial year on digital literacy, bringing them into the process.
“And I think there’s a lot of excitement, because I don’t think there’s a worse job than sitting in home affairs [as] a committed official and then you have to tell someone who stood in the queue for five hours that the system is offline.”
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