Members of the media and representatives of the Diplomatic
Corps.
On 9 February this year, President Mbeki delivered his
State-of-the-Nation Address in Parliament, outlining the
direction in which Government was to proceed in 2001 in pursuit
of the objective of a better life for all. In this presentation,
I will endeavour to give an overview of the contributions of the
Department of Home Affairs towards this objective of working
together for a better future for all South Africans.
When outlining the economic strategies of this programme of
action, President Mbeki specifically referred to the fact that
"immigration laws and procedures will be reviewed urgently
to enable us to attract skills into our country." In this
regard, I am glad to report that the Immigration Bill was
eventually passed by the Cabinet and is currently going through
the parliamentary process. The new system of migration control
expressed by the Immigration Bill that is now before Parliament
will provide a comprehensive structural rearrangement of
migration control and the Department. We will have the
opportunity to re-design our Department in respect of migration
control, and to adjust it to the changed requirements of the new
legislation. The restructuring of migration control will also
offer the opportunity to commence the process of planning the
devolution of the delivery aspects of civic affairs to
municipalities. Moreover, the simpler requirements for the
issuance of temporary and permanent residence permits and the
decentralisation of their issuance will free administrative
capacity, which we intend to divert towards law enforcement and
refugee affairs.
The Bill has received wide support in civil society, in spite of
being part of what will always remain a controversial field, and
I trust that we may fulfil the intention that the President
expressed in his State-of-the-Nation address this year, that the
Bill be passed through the parliamentary process in the current
year. My Department and the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs
will work hand in hand in processing this Bill and I have assured
the Committee that I and my staff will be available at all times
to provide whatever assistance the Committee may require in this
task, which I know from experience to be a very difficult and
complex one.
While the enactment of this Bill is being finalised my Department
is constantly working towards improving the quality of services
currently being rendered in the immigration sphere.
The Department of Home Affairs has often been criticised that
immigration applications in respect of foreign investors and
entrepreneurs take too long to finalise. The procedures I
implemented during 1999 to fast track these applications are
still in place. However, the budgetary and personnel constraints
the Department experiences, resulted in a backlog of immigration
applications in certain provinces. To address the matter, I
promulgated Resolutions in December 1999 and again in April 2000,
which allowed for officials of the Department to finalise
straightforward immigration applications and the Immigrants
Selection Committees to concentrate on the applications of
foreigners who wish to be employed in the RSA and those who wish
to establish businesses. The Resolutions of April 2000 are, in
fact, still in place and even the Department of Home Affairs'
Head Office is involved in the process of finalising as many
applications as possible.
There is a growing awareness amongst Home Affairs officials
regarding the constitutional implications of present migration
legislation. Decisions were previously based purely on the
interpretation of Departmental policy or legislation, which
sometimes resulted in hasty decisions, often with disastrous
consequences. It, however, became evident that the recommended
solutions in problematic cases are these days extensively debated
in terms of the constitutional rights of the persons concerned
and court rulings against the Department.
My Department is in the process of computerising its visa system,
as part of our efforts to improve service delivery, but also to
improve the integrity of the system. The visa system entails the
capturing of data of a visa applicant on computer in the foreign
mission where the application is lodged and transferring the data
via Head Office to the ports of entry. Once a person enters
through these ports of entry, his/her particulars are already
available to the immigration officer, thus expediting the
clearance process and eliminating forgeries. This computerised
visa system is already implemented at 54 SA missions abroad. The
implementation of a further 23 new missions and the upgrading of
12 existing missions are scheduled for the current financial
year. It is foreseen that the project will continue for another
year, by which time the system at all the missions will have been
computerised. Thirty-four missions are already using Internet
communication that is substantially cheaper than normal data
lines.
Since the introduction of the service delivery standard of
issuing visas within 10 days of application, the South African
missions abroad have issued visas within the 10 days period at a
success rate of 95%. This is indeed an achievement that we are
proud of and can be regarded as an indication of my Department's
commitment towards service delivery improvement.
Most of the delegates attending the NGO Forum and the World
Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban recently were issued
and arrived with the necessary visas. Special arrangements were
implemented to accommodate those who arrived without the
necessary visas.
Computerisation of border posts is also taking place as part of
my Department's efforts to improve services. Fifty-one of the
sixty computerised border posts are already transferring data of
travellers via satellite, six ports of entry (including
Johannesburg International Airport) make use of FTP (File
Transfer Protocol) communication and three ports of entry
transfer data via modem communication. These transfers take place
on a daily basis and substantially reduce the delays in capturing
the data on the main frame.
The current Home Affairs system suffers from being, in essence, a
conglomeration of largely redundant separate systems, requiring a
large amount of additional manual work to produce the required
information. Because of technical problems with the collection
and storage of data, information is not always up to date and
there have been serious delays in the past in the provision of
information.
The need to update the system grows more urgent daily, but
efforts to update it have failed, largely due to the lack of
funds. Even though Departments are working together to rectify
the matter, their combined resources fall far short of the funds
needed. The phasing in of the re-write of the system will enjoy a
high priority during this financial year.
As a further effort at improving service delivery, the Minister
of Home Affairs of Mozambique and I agreed that the creation of a
one-stop border post at Lebombo/Ressano Garcia, utilising the
current facilities, would be investigated. The proposed sharing
of facilities on both sides of the border would make provision
for the traveller departing from the RSA to stop at the current
South African facility for immigration and customs clearance out
of South Africa and proceed into Mozambique without having to
drive and stop again. The same procedure, in reverse, would be
repeated on the Mozambican side for travellers departing from
that country.
The implementation of the one-stop border post is subject to the
conclusion of an international agreement which makes provision
for the application of national legislation on the territory of
another state as well as the availability of funds to alter the
existing office space.
In my Budget Appropriation Debate in May this year, I referred to
measures introduced to keep abreast with prevailing circumstances
pertaining to temporary residence matters. These measures had the
desired effect and currently there is no backlog in respect of
temporary residence permits.
I have also instructed the Department that foreign spouses of
South African citizens and permanent residents must be allowed to
work within South Africa and that they be eligible for work
permits free of charge, while the renewal of their permits will
also be entertained free of charge. It should be noted that such
spouses must lodge an application for an immigration permit
within ninety-days from the date of receipt of a temporary
residence permit.
Measures are also currently in place to accommodate the residence
of life partners in South Africa. I recently reviewed and
extended the cut-off date of 19 March 2001 for life partners of
South African citizens or permanent residents to apply for an
extension of their exemptions. These life partners have the
opportunity to work in South Africa and to apply for permanent
residence. All these interim measures will be dealt with in the
new legislation once enacted.
The President also mentioned in his State-of-the-Nation Address
the importance of taking the necessary steps to push back the
frontiers of racism and xenophobia. Concerning the latter, my
Department has a specific role to play and indeed endeavours to
do so. Our current immigration system reflects the previous mind
set and limited needs of a country in international isolation,
which was suspicious of foreigners. Within the short span of a
few years we had to re-think new systems of immigration control
which we are now in the process of bringing about legislatively,
through legislation now pending before Parliament. In fact, the
Immigration Bill introduces for the first time, the statutory
function of fighting xenophobia and lodges it within the
Department which must become aware of this evil, both in respect
of activities within society as well as that which concerns its
own internal workings.
We also had to integrate within our system, and metabolise within
our administrative practice and national awareness, the
international prescripts of refugee law and develop our own
refugee legislation. This year marks the first anniversary of the
implementation of the Refugees Act (130) of 1998 and its
attendant Regulations. To mark the occasion, the Department of
Home Affairs and the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) embarked on a series of road shows, starting in
April 2001, to the Gauteng and the Western Cape Provinces in
order to sensitise communities about the plight of refugees in
South Africa. The road shows will be concluded in October 2001 in
Durban and Port Elizabeth and will hopefully contribute towards
curbing xenophobia amongst South Africans who sometimes have
difficulty in distinguishing between refugees and illegal or
undocumented migrants.
Regarding reference in the President's address to coordinated
programmes by the social sector in nodal rural and urban areas
focused on the social upliftment of the most disadvantaged in our
society, I can report that my Department is contributing in this
regard, inter alia by improving access to Home Affairs services.
I have referred before to my Department's process of
re-evaluating the present location of its network of offices to
endeavour to align this with the new municipal areas. I have
often stated that the long-term strategic vision is that of
devolving the delivery of civic affairs services to
municipalities, so that people will be able to receive their IDs
and birth, marriage and death certificates from their city hall.
This is the only rational way to redress the spatial imbalance in
the present distribution of our offices while improving on
overall efficiency. In fact, municipal offices could be used as a
one-stop service for a variety of delegated national services as
well as compatible municipal functions. As happened when I first
launched the reform of our migration system, I am again
experiencing internal friction and resistance. I have instructed
our Chief Director of Strategic Planning to produce a detailed
strategy and plan to bring this about and to coordinate to this
end with the Department of Provincial and Local Government, and I
am awaiting results.
Pending the overall reform of the delivery of civic affairs
services, as a further step in this direction, we have now
cooperated closely with the Independent Electoral Commission
(IEC) and utilised their state of the art Geographical
Information System to ensure that the placement of offices of
Home Affairs are in fact correlated with the population
distribution. We are also continuing with the process of
negotiating with local and rural authorities for co-operation in
the rendering of civic services. These negotiations have met with
positive responses from several quarters and very recently, we
have entered into an agreement with the Hlaneki and Homu Tribal
Authorities in the Northern Province to use their premises to
provide some of the Department's services. An office at Hlaneki
Tribal Authority became operational from 1 August 2001. Offices
at Homu Tribal Authority and Jane Furse Hospital became
operational on 3 September 2001.
The Hlaneki Tribal Authority, consisting of six villages, is home
to more than 80 000 people who always had to travel long
distances to access Home Affairs services. Adjacent villages will
also benefit from this initiative.
Personnel and equipment will be provided from the Giyani and
Lebowakgomo Regional Offices of the Department respectively.
Computerisation of these offices will be effected as soon as
possible.
Preliminary discussions with the Mayors of the Greater
Metropolitan Councils of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Mogale also
took place with the purpose of possible securing Home Affairs
office accommodation from the different councils. Negotiations in
this regard are continuing.
Through these partnerships, the Department is complying with the
Batho Pele principle of accessibility and aligning its objectives
with the integrated rural development strategy of government.
Earlier this year, at the opening of the Mpuluzi MPCC in
Mpumalanga, I also committed myself to co-operating closely with
the GCIS initiative to establish Multi-Purpose Community Centres
(MPCCs) to integrate service delivery at community level,
especially in rural areas. MPCCs have allowed for close
collaboration between national, provincial and local governments,
as these centres are homes for government services in different
spheres. My Department is involved in all the MPCCs currently
operational and will participate in all future MPCCs to be
established.
A strategic decision taken earlier this year as part of our
efforts to improve service delivery was that the Population
Register would need to be re-written, as the integrity of the
current system had become questionable. The National Population
Register (NPR) is the backbone system of the Department of Home
Affairs and is used as the initial front desk input and queries
environment regarding all departmental transactions for the South
African public. No birth, marriage or death certificates can be
issued or printed without this system, as the NPR maintains the
central data repository containing all demographic information
related to the individual. The NPR can therefore be regarded as
the main data transport vehicle for the Directorate: Civic
Services. In the long run, the revamping of our Population
Register and the HANIS project will constitute the backbone
enabling central government to delegate the delivery of civic
affairs to municipalities without jeopardising quality standards
of delivery or the integrity of the system.
This system is also used by the insurance and banking industry to
verify and validate deaths. It has been calculated that the
availability of this service to the Insurance sector has saved
the sector in the region of R22 million to R30 million per annum
in fraud prevention.
Based on evaluations and analysis of the NPR environment, it was
concluded that the largest contributing factor to the
Department's service impact and business process cost, is the
current, largely manual records and archiving environment, which
is utilised by all components of the Department for verification,
validation and Information processing. High level calculations
performed for the Chief Directorate: Civic Services indicate that
the budget impact caused by the largely manual records
environment can be between R200 million and R400 million per
annum. Since the records environment is the foundation platform
for the NPR and all additional Home Affairs systems and
processes, it was decided that a document management system
should be addressed first.
During July 2000, we approved the implementation of a
transversal, online records system for the Department that will
provide the following:
* Replacement of the current microfilm and paper records
environment, which is utilising excessive floor space within all
the Home Affairs offices throughout the country;
* A large reduction in the cost of business transactions to the
Department;
* Expansive fraud and corruption reduction relating to all
systems and business processes of the Department;
* Effective front-desk client service, thus improving the
responsiveness and public image of the Department;
* Effective movement of the greater portion of the Department's
workload to the front-desk, which will relieve Head Office staff
members of the current backlog and workload and effectively
improve transaction turnaround times;
* Effective and fast queries and verifications, due to greatly
improved system response times;
* Greatly reduced workload for all Home Affairs staff members,
permitting these staff members to attend to other important work;
* Information accuracy and integrity, due to the visual nature of
the system;
* Simplification of all business processes e.g. the issuing of
unabridged birth, death and marriage certificates, as well as
citizen and permanent residence verification and authentication;
and
* A centralised and standardised records system, which will
remove the need for the numerous costly point solutions currently
utilised. This will reduce the overall cost impact to the
Department of Home Affairs for these systems.
Although it is essential to implement the system as soon as
possible, it was suggested that the workload be spread over a
greater period. A tender for the acquisition and implementation
of the first phase of an online Document Management System was
published during May 2001. The evaluation of the tender responses
received is currently in process.
The intention is to have a contract for this in place towards the
end of October 2001.
In my Budget Appropriation speech in May this year, I reported on
the dire straits in which the Department of Home Affairs finds
itself with respect to human resources. This view was also
confirmed in the Public Service Commission's Report, "Home
Affairs Batho Pele and Management Audit Investigations
2000", which states that the Department requires an
additional 1 063 posts on its establishment to render an
efficient service. I also reported on the process of filling 231
critical posts within the Department. This process will be
finalised soon and National Treasury has fortunately made
available the necessary funds required for this for the current
financial year. I also spoke about the need for a scientifically
based staff establishment for the Department to be compiled,
taking into account not where we were six years ago, but where we
wish to be in five to fifteen years. The Department of Public
Service and Administration has since indicated that they are
prepared to undertake this investigation with no cost to the
Department, utilising donor funds.
My Department will also need to attend to the policy formulation
necessary to rewrite the electoral law. Present legislation has
given the Independent Electoral Commission the power and function
to review existing legislation to propose amendments which may be
necessary based on the practical experience gained from running
the last elections. However, the drafting of a new electoral law,
which is demanded by our Constitution, is the expression of the
policy responsibility of the Executive and cannot be conducted by
a Chapter 9 independent institution such as our Electoral
Commission. For this reason, and to ensure that a transparent and
all-inclusive process of policy formulation could take place, I
took the initiative of proposing the appointment of a task team
to be headed by Dr. F van Zyl Slabbert. After some uncertainty
and U-turns, the notion that such task team should exist and that
it should be headed by Dr van Zyl Slabbert has finally been
adopted, as was confirmed by the President. However, this task
team has not been established yet, nor has it begun its work,
owing to a process which must first be completed and which now
rests with the Deputy President. This process will primarily
consist of consultations among political parties on certain
issues to be identified by the Deputy President. As soon as the
process is complete, and based on whatever guidance I may
receive, I expect to be in a position to give Dr van Zyl Slabbert
and his team the long-awaited go-ahead.
In conclusion, my Department and I are committed to contributing
towards improving the lives of the people of South Africa, inter
alia, through constantly improving access to and the quality of
services that we render. If the progress in this regard seems
slow, please bear in mind the severe financial and human resource
restraints under which my Department needs to function, and know
that we are doing everything within our power to ensure a better
life for all.
I thank you.