Department Budget: briefing

Meeting report

HOME AFFAIRS AD HOC COMMITTEE; SOCIAL SERVICES SELECT COMMITTEE: JOINT MEETING
1 June 2004
DEPARTMENT OF HOME AFFAIRS BUDGET: BRIEFING

Chairpersons: Mr H Chauke (ANC) (Home Affairs) and Ms J Masilo (ANC) (Social Services)

Documents handed out:
Budget presentation by Chief Finance Officer
Director General briefing
DHA Budget Vote 4 for 2004/05
Introductory Remarks by Deputy Minister
Capital Projects for 2005/2005
Office Accommodation
Draft Strategic Business Plan

SUMMARY
The Deputy Minister introduced the Department's presentation on its budget. The Director General briefed the Committee on the budget introducing the Turnaround Strategy which was to overhaul the Department by transforming it and improving service delivery. A financial briefing on the Department Budget was provided by the Chief Financial Officer.

MINUTES
The Chair welcomed the Deputy Minister and Director General. He explained that this briefing on the Budget Vote for the Department of Home Affairs was in preparation for the debate on this budget in the National Assembly. He noted that the Portfolio Committee had visited each Home Affairs office in the country prior to the April election and the Committee had identified areas where there were massive problems. The media daily carried stories about the incompetence of the Department on issues such as problems with identity documents and illegal marriages. The Chair noted that the Department was also taken to court more frequently than any other Department. The Portfolio Committee wanted to assist the Department in improving. The immediate challenges for the Department were the upcoming local government elections, sustaining the identity document (ID) campaign and the problem of corruption within the Department.

Home Affairs had to give a clear direction as to how they would deal with these problems. The proposed Turnaround Strategy had to be clear and inform how the change would happen. He gave the example of HANIS (Home Affairs National Identification System) project into which one billion rand had been invested with no results. The project was not moving therefore Home Affairs had to explain where it was. The Department was constantly facing Information and Technology (IT) problems. Every office had to have a computer, printer and photocopier machine at the very least. On a positive note Mr Chauke reflected that there had been some achievements such as the many laws that had been passed last year although there will still issues of implementation. He asked for information about how far along the implementation of the Immigration Act was.

Introduction by Deputy Minister
Deputy Minister, Mr Malusi Gigaba, introduced the presentation from the Department that would outline the programme priorities as well as the proposed budget allocations. He explained the new phase of the Department which was that of transformation. The crisis at Home Affairs ran very deeply therefore change was necessary. The aim was to improve service delivery, introduce new programmes, overhaul infrastructure and introduce a new institutional culture (see presentation).

Director General's briefing on the Department of Home Affairs budget
Mr Barry Gilder (Deputy General) briefed the Committee on the financials for 2003/4/5 and the draft strategic business plan. He explained the history of Turnaround Strategy, where it was going and what it would do. He presented the strategy's impact on people, infrastructure, technology, service delivery, corruption, immigration, civic services and funding. He concluded by admitting that the Turnaround Strategy was an ambitious strategy but it was necessary in order to pull the Department out of its current chaotic state. He requested members to support the resourcing of the project (see presentation).

Discussion
Mr K W Morwamoche (ANC) asked the Director General if the Turnaround Strategy was the correct channel in which to improve. He also referred to the Limpopo province and said that there was a new demarcation in the country with Limpopo now having 6 regions as opposed to 4 in the old dispensation. How had it worked before with 4 representatives.

Mr Gilder explained that the realigning of the organisational structure was based on the new demarcation of the country. They had introduced provincial managers whereas before they just had 10 provincial directors general. Each province now had a provincial manager. He pointed out that funding was always an issue.

Mr S S Vundisa (ANC) asked why one of offices in the Northern Cape was closed in 1992. Service delivery was not close to the people with some people having to travel over 130 km to reach a Home Affairs office. There was a population of 51 000 around those areas and people should not have to travel that far for a death or birth certificate.

Mr Gilder admitted that he did not know about the closed office but he would make enquires. He said that the restructuring proposals were designed to provide for different levels of population and distance. It was a realistic resource strategy. He added that they had received funding for 67 mobile units which they hoped to extend in the years to come. This would take the service to the people.

Ms A Van Wyk (ANC) asked if the training of staff would also include retraining of staff because the track record of Home Affairs showed a great need for retraining. She asked if there was a timeframe in which re-training was to happen before the mentoring started. There would be no use in starting the mentoring without the retraining of staff.

Mr Gilder confirmed that there would be retraining and that it had been included as part of training. There were programmes in place for old and new members.

Mr S N Swart (ACDP) asked if the loss of documents would be solved by the Turnaround Strategy. The current strategy was not the best because of the distance from Home Affairs offices. He asked how Turnaround Strategy (TAS) would bring services closer to the people thus improving service delivery.

Mr Gilder replied that HANIS would remove the problem of the loss of documents. In the future Home Affairs would have much less need for hard copies because everything would be done online. Most of the process of applying for documents would be online. The planning was designed to deal with the problem of document loss.

Ms N Mathibela (ANC) noted that a mere 2 million records had been captured by HANIS. She asked how it would be possible to meet the objective of HANIS Reloaded capturing 46 million people if in the past eight years, 32 million had not even been captured. How would TAS assist in capturing fingerprint records?

Mr Gilder explained that HANIS was an electronic database of the fingerprints of citizens. What had been captured was the applications that had come in during that period. They had to convert paper fingerprint records of thirty million citizens. The introduction of the new ID card would reach 30 million who qualified for the card. They would provide 1 to 2 million who come to get new IDs or reissue to those who had an ID book.

Mr Chauke suspended questions about general information about the four programmes; Administration, Civic Services, Immigration, and Auxiliary and Associated Services. He wanted to focus on the budget and get a proper sense of the distribution of the money because the Committee had to approve the budget allocated to the Department. The presentation from the Director General did not cover all the detail that was needed. Nor had the Director General adequately responded to Ms Mathibela's question as the Director General had not explained how thirty million people would be reached. He said that each programme should be dealt with one by one and assess how each office was staffed and equipped. Firstly the budget report would be concentrated on.

Mr M Thetijeng (ANC) asked about Civic Services on pg 6 on the DHA Budget Vote. It outlined the registering of new births immediately and finding those who are unregistered or without IDs. His concern was the number of mistakes that happen due to the incorrect recording of birth dates. For example his mother was shown to be only four years older than him because of a misprint in the ID. The mix up in the rural areas is a problem because people did not know when they were born because they could not read and write. The situation predominantly happens in the rural areas. The member wanted to know if any new regulations had been put in place to assist the situation because people are suffering with wrong IDs.

Mr Gilder replied he was aware that there were challenges such as incorrect birth dates. They were trying to address them with all the proposed interventions. It was a reality that black people in the old regime were left out of the mainstream recording therefore records were inaccurate and wrong. It would take time to clean the population record but this was part of the transformation of the Department. It was why they had introduced TAS - to fast track the transformation process.

Mr W Shkosana (ANC) asked about the addition of numbers of staff to assist with the TAS. Was there a placement programme in place to not only keep the right person at the right place but also to put the right person at the right post? He also asked about recruitment and wanted to know if this was being done internally because the Director General had mentioned many posts being advertised but he had only seen two posts advertised in the City Press in the last week. Which papers were being used for advertisements? He also asked for clarity around the recruitment agency as this was not pleasing to the Committee because the Department should have capacity to deal with recruitment. There were already three hundred and fifty internships running which could provide capacity.

Mr Gilder said that the recruitment and placement strategy included a number of elements. There was not enough time to go into detail in the presentation. Apart from recruitment and training, the whole human resource strategy did include the development of a proper management and placement strategy to ensure that the right people are recruited, trained and prepared, properly remunerated and that their careers are managed. A further aim was to retain them. The advertising campaign was directed at the majority of the population. They normally advertised, depending on the nature of the job or the province, by focusing on regional papers and in some national papers like the City Press, the Sunday Times and other publications over the weekend. They were using an external recruitment agency as a pilot project. They did have their own capacity but they had launched a major recruitment drive to take on over a thousand people and more in this year and a further increase in the years to come. Outside resources were needed to assist with this process. The agency had nothing to do with selecting the persons chosen. The Department would select. They agency facilitated the process by receiving, processing and preparing the applications for the Department to conduct the interviews and the selection process.

Ms S Kalyan (DA) asked what the difference was between HANIS and HANIS Reloaded. HANIS was stuck and it had not yet taken off so how could there be a new one? She said that the Director General had mentioned infrastructure in terms of 'worst office intervention'. She wanted to know many offices needed immediate attention but the presentation was short on detail on how many there were and if these offices are disability friendly.

Mr Gilder replied that the difference between HANIS 1 and HANIS Reloaded was that HANIS was designed in 1996 in order to computerise the fingerprint records of citizens of the country. It was a massive programme and HANIS 1 went live in August 2002. HANIS 1 was not stuck it had made a lot of progress. What was stuck was certain elements to extend HANIS. What had been stuck was the national ID card and the conversion of paper fingerprints into electronic format. This has been rectified. HANIS Reloaded is just an extension of the HANIS Department to cover all the people that the Department dealt with that is citizens, permanent residents, temporary residents, asylum seekers, refugees and illegal foreigners that are detected, detained and deported. There are very important reasons for this. People can get access to birth certificates easily and are able to obtain IDs. HANIS Reloaded captures all the fraud because the Department can detect this by means of fingerprints. There was not enough time to give details on the state of the offices and the worst offices. That detail would be available to the Committee at a later stage. All offices are to be disability friendly - that was a standard. They would include mother's rooms for feeding babies.

Ms S Cheng (DA) asked what impact the new smartcard would have on the voters roll.

Mr Gilder replied that the Department had initiated discussions during the past elections with the IEC on how to use the introduction of the new electronic ID card to make the election process simpler and more user friendly. The IEC indicated that they would want future discussions with the Department on the future of the voters roll and the use of the ID card in the voting and registration process. So they were looking into that with the IEC.

Ms L Mabe asked about the presentation of IDs. She asked why the ID could not be like the birth certificate because the birth certificate automatically became the ID of the child.

Mr Gilder explained that it is required that ID cards have absolute security. The birth certificate was just a printed document which anybody could forge. The ID card had to be a card that could be used to access bank accounts, to access social grants and so on. So they had to be as secure as possible. The current ID book was not sufficiently secure which explains why the ID card could not be like a birth certificate. Regarding the question on manual systems an answer was given through the presentation. The problem was that the Department was still stuck largely with manual systems and TAS was designed to replace those systems over the next few years.

Mr Chauke asked the Department to comment on the Auditor General's Report the following day as he wanted to know if its recommendations had been taken into account and how far these had been implemented.

Budget Briefing by Chief Finance Officer
Mr Khambule (Chief Finance Officer) gave the budget overview for the 2003/04 financial year going through each programme. He explained the comparison between the 2003/04 expenditure trends with 2002/03. In Part II of the document he broke down the budget planning submission (MTEF) for 2004/05 - 2006/07.

Mr Chauke announced that the CFO's presentation would be discussed the following day and he adjourned the meeting.