The Home Affairs director-general has told Parliament that there are 9,025 unfunded vacancies in the Civic Services branch alone. Staff shortages, budget cuts and regular network failures are causing block-long queues outside offices across the country.
, the department, in its annual performance presentation plan of 26 April, requested an additional R266-million from Treasury for employment compensation to fill 762 vacant posts .
There are also vacancies in critical senior posts. The annual report states that the post of chief information officer, deputy director-general for counter corruption, as well as security services posts, are vacant. Legal services, policy, the Standing Committee for Refugee Affairs, the Refugee Appeals Authority, risk management and the inspectorate are “undercapacitated”.
The PSA, according to national spokesperson Reuben Maleka, demands staff be paid overtime should they be required to work on Saturdays. As indicated in the annual report, the department is already struggling with a limited budget to pay employees.Queuing outside Home Affairs before sunrise is no guarantee of making it into the building before sunset.
To answer this question, he said the department, together with Sita, had upgraded five offices to the gold service-level agreement to determine whether this would lead to improved network connectivity in those offices. The outcome of the proof of concept “is awaited”. “Reachability is defined as ‘the percentage of time the monitoring tools housed at Sita premises can communicate with an element or the device at the [Department of Home Affairs] offices’,” stated Tlali.
Home Affairs is dependent on the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure to acquire and maintain office space.The lack of budget, lack of online connectivity, lack of modernisation in many offices and staff shortages, all of which also require efforts from other departments, combine to frustrate citizens’ needs to comply with obligations placed upon them by the state.
With the Barrack Street Home Affairs office only processing about 80 ID applications per day, many people still queuing at midday are likely to be turned away. The dysfunction at Home Affairs has created opportunities for informal sector entrepreneurs. A group of about 20 homeless people have taken to sleeping on the street outside the Barrack Street office. As the queue starts gathering from as early as 5am, they sell their place at the front for R100 to latecomers arriving after 6am.
He said people started hiring chairs from 6am, but business was usually slow until midday, when people got tired and the shade disappeared. “They hand out 80 numbers a day,” said Ramushwana. “When the offices opened [at 8am], the queue was to the corner of the block.”on a Monday, he said he had initially come to Home Affairs at 10am the previous Friday to discover he would not get served and would have to return and line up early on Monday.
Unemployed, he had struggled to get the money to travel from Hout Bay, where he lives, to the city centre twice, as well as paying the R140 to get a new ID card. “DHA is overcontrolled by its Pretoria office. Branches are not permitted to fix errors on the DHA national computer system. Everything has to go to Pretoria for correction.”
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