Lungile Ntimba
Home Affairs Minister, Leon Schreiber has called for the modernisation of the systems at Home Affairs from manual, paper-based procedures to digital platforms to fight fraud, corruption and crime.
Schreiber said Home Affairs needs to move away from all this human interaction, handwritten documents, and to digitisation, and allow online applications.
“Home affairs systems are vulnerable to fraud, corruption and discretion because they are outdated, and paper-based,” warned Schreiber.
Schreiber cited the case of former Miss SA contestant, Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina whose identity is being investigated and the 95 Libyan nationals who entered South Africa illegally and stayed in a military training camp near White River in Mpumalanga – as a sign to “move to digitisation”.
It was “unacceptable” that these foreign nationals could enter South Africa using handwritten documents, he said.
“How can we regard ourselves as a serious nation when we still allow entrance in our country based on handwritten documents that could easily be forged?” asked Schreiber.
The Minister stressed that the lack of a modern digital integrated system, to process all applications and communications at Home Affairs is the root cause of the threat to national security.
“How can South Africa regard itself as a serious nation when we refuse to embrace something as simple as online applications, which would never even allow a user to click submit if an application is incomplete?”
INSIDE POLITICS
