The department of home affairs has built the first working prototype of South Africa’s Digital ID, with Minister Leon Schreiber demonstrating what he described as the country’s first official digital identity credential using his own personal information.
The prototype is at the centre of an ambitious transformation programme that Schreiber says will turn a department long reliant on paper-based processes into a digitally driven service that can be accessed from homes, smartphones and bank branches rather than queues at government offices.
At the same time, the department will begin shutting down production of the green ID book next year, with the document set to cease being recognised as a valid form of identification from 31 March 2028.
Schreiber unveiled the plans at Constitution Hill on Thursday, describing what he called a “quantum leap” at his department — a shift from a centralised system of 329 physical offices, paper applications and manual processes to one based on digital identity, biometrics and decentralised access.
“This is Home Affairs @ home — radical reform delivered at pace and scale,” the minister said.
The Digital ID prototype is intended to become the smartphone-based counterpart to the physical Smart ID card. Schreiber said the system had been issued through the population register and bound to the chip in his smartphone.
“This is my own, real Digital ID credential,” he said, describing himself as the first South African citizen with a working Digital ID.
The department is processing public comments on draft regulations governing the system.
Schreiber said Digital ID would be voluntary and that the physical Smart ID card would remain available. The final regulations, he said, would place limits on the use of personal information, while users would be able to see when their data had been accessed.
Schreiber said the system could ultimately change the relationship between citizens and the department from one based on applications and queues to one in which government services were pushed securely to people who chose to use them.
His example was a passport renewal. Six months before an opted-in citizen’s passport expired, the department could notify them through Digital ID, prepare the renewal application using information it held, allow the person to verify it biometrically and make payment, and then deliver the new passport to their home.
“No queue. No form. Not even an application,” Schreiber said.
The Digital ID is one of three major reforms that Schreiber said are being accelerated after the department moved faster than expected during the first half of the Government of National Unity’s term.
The others are the decentralisation of the department’s services through more than 1 000 bank branches and the electronic travel authorisation system, which is being expanded into the department’s main digital platform for visas and immigration services.
Schreiber said he had initially expected the three projects to take the full five-year term.
Instead, he said, the department was sufficiently ahead of schedule to introduce further reforms, including a new electronic passport, automated border controls and a nationwide campaign to document every South African citizen who remained without IDs.
For the minister, however, the most serious failure he encountered when he took over home affairs was not the queues, paper files or ageing IT systems. It was that millions of South Africans remained undocumented in their own country.
More than three decades after the end of apartheid, he said, people were unable to prove their citizenship because they lacked the documents needed to establish their identity.
Schreiber said that had consequences far beyond the inconvenience of obtaining an ID. Without the necessary documentation, citizens could struggle to access services and opportunities, including banking, social grants and employment.
Schreiber placed the failure in the broader history of South Africa, arguing that the democratic transition of 1994 established the principle of equal citizenship in law, but that millions of people had yet to experience the full reality of that citizenship because they remained outside the formal identity system.
The aim, Schreiber said, was to free the department from the routine transactions that consumed its limited capacity so that officials could focus on finding and documenting citizens who have never been fully captured by the system.
That was why, alongside its digital reforms, the department was preparing a “historic campaign” for the 2028/29 financial year to document every undocumented South African citizen.
The campaign would include a review of the requirements and processes for late birth registration and other documentation, followed by the deployment of mobile biometric teams into communities. The goal was to have every South African citizen formally documented by the end of the current administration in 2029.
Production of the green ID book would stop on 31 March 2027, with the 14.7 million citizens and permanent residents who hold only the document given a further year to replace it.
From 31 March 2028, the green ID book would no longer be recognised as valid identification under the Identification Act.
Schreiber said naturalised citizens, permanent residents and South Africans living abroad would also be enabled to obtain Smart IDs before production ended.
First-time applicants and people over 60 would remain exempt from the Smart ID application fee. The department was simultaneously expanding access to Smart ID services beyond its traditional offices.
About 515 bank branches offered Smart ID replacement services, compared with 214 before the GNU was formed. More than 822 500 people had used the service, Schreiber said.
By the end of 2026, the service was expected to be available at more than 1 000 service points.
Passport applications and first-time Smart ID applications would also be introduced at participating bank branches, alongside secure courier delivery.
For Schreiber, the bank partnership illustrated the central idea behind the reform: the department should come to citizens rather than requiring citizens to travel to its branches.
That philosophy marked a sharp departure from the department he said he inherited.
When he took over 27 months ago, Schreiber said, thousands of ministerial submissions were arriving as paper files packed into cardboard boxes. More than 306 000 visa applications were sitting in backlog, some for years, while the department’s live-capture system for Smart IDs and passports was under severe pressure.
He said more than 250 000 ID applications were stuck in limbo and that the department was operating with only 40% of the resources required for its existing service-delivery model.
Schreiber argued that simply adding more money and staff to the existing system would not be enough. Even a fully functional network of 329 offices, he said, could not effectively serve 63 million South Africans and more than 10 million visitors a year.
“The task at hand is therefore not actually to fix Home Affairs as it had existed previously. It is to radically reform the model itself, by replacing centralised, physical processes with decentralised, digital access,” he said.
Towards the end of his address, Schreiber returned to the cardboard boxes he said had greeted him when he took over Home Affairs.
“Long travel times, queues, paperwork and centralisation at just 329 locations is being replaced by over a thousand decentralised, digital self-service options,” he said.
“The fraud-prone Green ID book is being replaced by a modern and secure Digital Identity system.”
And, most importantly, he said, “for millions of undocumented citizens, decades of exclusion are being replaced by a systematic campaign of inclusion, recognition and the delivery of dignity.”