Hon Speaker, the department, as you would know, has introduced a new passport which has new security measures to try and deal with some of the security problems around the passport. As you know, the major problem was not the passport itself but that it was issued to the wrong people.
We have also introduced another measure whereby the people who capture the data for passports have to log in with their thumbs because they were previously using passwords and they were exchanging the passwords to the point that you could never trace the person who produced the passport that was given to somebody who shouldn't have it. We have recently introduced a system whereby you log in with your password and with your thumb so that we can tell exactly who produced which passport and who captured what information and for what passport. This will assist us in determining if somebody has issued the passports to the wrong people.
However, the passport is at the end of the line. The real document that we should secure is a birth certificate, because it is the birth certificate that enables you to get an identity document, ID, and a passport. So, if you tighten up the passport and not the birth certificate, once they have the birth certificate people would be able to get the passport no matter how tight your protocols are. That is why we are looking at tightening up the birth certificate protocols.
According to the law, every child should have a birth certificate within 30 days after his or her birth, but nobody is sticking to that. So, we would like to enforce that law which will ensure that everybody has their birth certificate before they even apply for an ID. This is because it is easier to determine the citizenship of a baby by using an ID than it is to determine that of a 30-year-old.
There is a problem with this late registration of birth where you get a 60- year-old coming to register for the first time. You can't tell whether that 60-year-old is from South Africa or not. If you have three 60-year-olds, one from Mozambique, one from Lesotho and one from South Africa, how can you tell? We are trying to tighten the birth certificate protocols, and that is why we have a campaign that says: We are going to issue birth certificates to all South Africans who don't have them in the next two years, so that we can do away with the late registration of births, which is the one that is used as a loophole.
Of course, if we get an illegitimately issued passport, we confiscate it and it is destroyed and that person is removed from the population register if he or she is there and, of course, we also alert the law-enforcement agencies. Thank you. [Applause.]