SA’s national security would continue to be undermined if the processes of the department of home affairs were not urgently digitised to remove the possibility of human discretion in the adjudication of applications for documents such as IDs and visas, home affairs minister Leon Schreiber told MPs on Tuesday, in his first address to the parliamentary committee on home affairs.
The department, which now operates manually, has been plagued by fraud and corruption with illegal immigrants paying officials to get documents. The most recent case uncovered was that of the mother of Miss SA hopeful Chidimma Adetshina, who was given an ID stolen from someone else about 23 years ago.
In an interview with Business Day after his engagement with MPs, Schreiber said digitisation would be the apex project for the department and would be built into its annual performance and five-year strategic plans. While digitisation had been on the agenda for several years, he was determined to do something about it.
He acknowledged, however, that this would require more funds being allocated by the Treasury to the department, which suffered the largest cut of all departments in last year’s budget. The department had been “gutted” financially to such an extent that it had only 40% of the staff it required to do its job.
Schreiber was adamant that a “Rolls-Royce” system that would be switched on in one go was not desirable, and what was needed was an engine onto which separate digitised elements of the system could be added on gradually.
While there was some digitisation under way in the department, what was lacking was a workflow and adjudication engine.
In his address to the committee, Schreiber used the digital transformation of the SA Revenue Service as an example of what could be achieved, which enabled it to become one of the best state entities in the country and one of the most effective tax authorities in the world.
Schreiber said the briefings that departmental officials would give on the granting of visas to the 95 now-deported Libyans and 82 Ethiopians who came to SA for military training, and the ID obtained by Adetshina’s mother “should shock all of us”. These were not isolated incidents but symptoms of a “systemic crisis”.
The visas obtained by the Libyans were written by hand, which could be easily forged, he said. They were processed even though they did not contain all of the requisite documentation. Department of international relations and co-operation officials in Tunis, who were not under the management control of home affairs processed the visa applications of the Libyans.
Home affairs director-general Tommy Makhode said officials of the State Security Agency, the department of international relations and co-operation and home affairs’ anticorruption unit were investigating the issue of visas to the Libyans, which involved a host of irregularities.
Schreiber said: “What you will see amounts to nothing less than a threat to national security that can only be addressed through the total and sustained digital transformation of home affairs into a digital-first department.
“The number one lesson from these cases is that the lack of a modern digital system to process all applications, adjudications and communication at home affairs is the root cause of the national security threat we face in this sector.
“The common denominator is that home affairs’ systems are vulnerable to fraud, corruption and discretion because they are outdated, antiquated, paper-based, manual and, therefore, open to subversion. It would frankly be a dereliction of duty if we do not move with urgency to digitally transform home affairs,” Schreiber said.
“How can SA regard ourselves as a serious nation when we refuse to embrace something as simple as online applications, which will never even allow a user to click ‘submit’ if the application is not complete?” he asked.
“Which person on earth could justify the use of such an antiquated, broken and vulnerable system when we live in the year 2024, with technology at our fingertips that could instantly solve each and every one of these problems?
“Incidents of identity theft, long queues, visa fraud and corruption will keep happening, over and over and over again, forever, if we fail to digitally transform home affairs,” Schreiber stressed.
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