Chair, hon Ministers, the ACDP would have thought that this department, more than any other, should have been divided and restructured. Migration, immigration and related issues, for example, surely need a dedicated, more specific focus. We are, however, pleased to see a special allocation to Information Technology, IT, and commend efforts by the department to set up a special call centre for citizens to check if they have been wrongly declared dead and to check their marriage status due to fake marriages being registered. Has there been sufficient publicity to ensure public access to this?
South Africa's Department of Home Affairs has been crippled by corruption and inefficiency over many years. In 2005 a young man won the sympathy of many South Africans when he held a Home Affairs official hostage with a fake gun, demanding his identity document after a two-year wait for his ID book, which is vital in every aspect of daily life.
We do appreciate that turning this department around is going to be a mammoth task, but we are concerned by the shocking number of documents and files being lost. It is now almost expected by document seekers that they will have to apply more than once, if not many times - a costly exercise in time and money. Olga Matsimbi in July last year had applied four times over five years to get an identity document before she could seek work and apply for her daughter's birth certificate and child support grant. A university graduate, who passed out top of his course at the University of Cape Town, was turned down by Home Affairs for a work permit. He should have already been a South African citizen but his parents' papers were lost by the department. He was snapped up by a Johannesburg firm who waited three months to be told that he had been turned down. On appeal, it appeared he was not rejected; the papers had just been lost.
Sadly, the steady stream of queries I get find little relief as I struggle to get a response from the department, wasting more man hours. People are waiting up to three years for approval of citizenship and permanent residence, only to be told that documents are lost. How much longer is this going to be the norm? Has an adequate budget been allocated to data capture and retrieval, to document storage and retrieval systems, and to train personnel to run them? Thank you. [Time expired.]