SA Home Affairs needed to be kicked in the nuts before it sorted itself out!

We have all either experienced the Home Affairs dismal service levels or at least been at the receiving end of someone else's bitching about the Home Affairs. The queues, the 4 month wait for your ID document to arrive, the rather intelligent counter staff, and the never ending corruption stories.

But due to major knocks to the PR of the dept by journalists from the likes of Special Assignment, Carte Blanche, the Sunday Times and a host of others, the Home Affairs Director-General Mavuso Msimang has rolled out a strategy to get things respectable again.


He has since managed to knock the wait for ID to be processed from 120 days down to 86 days, but is striving for a 60 turn around time.
He has also implimented a series of quick fixes to cut down on the blatant corruption of the dept, by tightening security, firing and charging staff found involved in any suspicious activities and implementing a tracking system for all applications and ID's in the processing system.
Well done DG Msimang!

Now, as part of this major drive, the dept. will be testing smart-card IDs. These will replace the current green bar coded ID, that we all so painstakingly got just a few years ago. The system will be full automated, and the amount of information stored on the card will allow the card to fullfil multiple tasks, like host your drivers license details on it as well.

I think that this is a huge step towards an organised nation. DG Msimang, if you get to read this, I do have a few suggestions for the card as well. Integrate it into our public transport system and allow users to buy credits either online, through machines located at transport interchanges, malls, etc, and develop a swiping system for the card for our trains, our buses and eventually in our taxis. This system is being used in Singapore now and it works absolutely great!

Good luck DG Msimang, I hope that one day all South Africans can talk about you like how we talk about our financial guru Trev!

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