The Democratic Alliance has presented Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula with a nine-step plan for turning her department into a functional and accountable branch of government.
Briefing the media at Parliament on Tuesday, DA spokesperson Sandy Kalyan said the department was in a state of crisis, and nobody in government seemed to be doing anything about it.
Problems included fraud, the unacceptable treatment of refugees, poor staff-management, financial disarray, failures in the administration of skilled immigration and the unacceptable levels of service provided to ordinary members of the public.
”The litany of documented failures, backlogs and case studies in incompetence is truly astonishing.
”The department was found last year to be responsible for hundreds of false marriages, fake ID books and fraudulent death certificates.
”These documents are used to defraud merchants and credit grantors, to perpetrate identity theft and gain illegal access to welfare payments meant for poor South Africans who legitimately hold ID books,” she said.
The DA proposed that accountability be increased by assigning identifiable people to every case or request the department dealt with.
A staff number should be quoted on all correspondence with the public and staff members should be quantitatively compared to their peers in terms of the number of formal complaints lodged against them and their successfully processed applications.
E-mail addresses should be provided to the public to lodge certain requests and so reduce the number of times a member of the public had to take time off work and travel to a department office.
This would also provide a useful, searchable record of communications which would increase accountability, Kalyan said.
Further, regulations requiring staff to wear name-tags should be enforced and the department’s budget should be increased.
The Home Affairs National Identification System (Hanis) should also be brought online as soon as possible.
Kalyan said the department should offer same-day delivery for key requests. Getting a birth certificate or ID book should be as simple as using a fingerprint scanner, having a photo taken, receiving secure online authorisation from Pretoria and printing the required document on-site.
A home-affairs ombudsman should immediately be established to take complaints and protect members of the public from mistreatment by the department.
Home affairs offices needed some fresh paint, seating and call-out numbers instead of queues, and a ”healthy improvement in common courtesy”.
If Mapisa-Nqakula failed to transform the department into a properly functioning entity, she should do the honourable thing and step down from her cabinet post, Kalyan said. — Sapa