The DA calls on the Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, to urgently review his department’s current system to manage the long queues and excessive delays at Home Affairs offices across the country.
The DA has been inundated with outraged citizens that lament the service at various Home Affairs offices, and recent oversights by the DA to the Home Affairs offices in Benoni and Edenvale revealed several concerning shortcomings.
At the Edenvale offices, officials were directing people to the Benoni and Kempton Park offices as their systems had been offline for days. The DA were informed that not only had no work been done for two days, but that this systems failure was a weekly occurrence. The continuous cable theft in the area prompted the office to install an MTN router, but this failed to solve the problem.
The DA had received a report alleging that the Home Affairs offices in Benoni was only assisting 5 people per hour while people were forced to stand in long queues without a queue marshal to ensure that social distancing is observed. Upon our arrival, we found a long queue with people indicating that they have been waiting for assistance since 07:30 that morning. The manager at this office informed the DA that they too were struggling with their system and that it was offline.
Both sites had also only capacitated their offices to 50% due to Covid-19 regulations.
While the DA understands that some services would be unavailable due to restrictions pertaining to Level 3 of the lockdown, it is simply unacceptable that the Minister and his Department has yet to come to a satisfactory solution. South Africa has experienced various levels of restrictions since March last year. Everyone has had to adapt and ensure service delivery, and it is high time that the ANC government did the same. Minister Motsoaledi is a medical doctor to boot. The DA would assume that he would know better than anyone the risk of contracting Covid-19 in long queues where the observance of social distancing becomes less the longer people are forced to wait in queues and then face the possibility of having to return the next day.
Home Affairs could easily solve the problem by availing some services online as well, enabling people to reserve appointment slots so that they only need to be at the offices at a certain time and dividing the queues according to the service required.
That Home Affairs have not implemented these very simple solutions after 17 months in lockdown shows the Minister’s poor leadership and lack of political will to truly address the failings of his Department.