Home Affairs lost 38 000 working hours due to load shedding

The Department of Home Affairs reports a significant loss of nearly 38,000 working hours over the last five financial years, attributed to the disruptions caused by load shedding.

HOME AFFAIRS HIT HARD BY LOAD SHEDDING LOSING 38 000 HOURS

The Eastern Cape has the highest amount of working hours lost at more than 7 900. Mpumalanga lost 5 990 hours, while Gauteng lost 4 621 working hours.

According to SABC News, Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, disclosed this while responding to a Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary question regarding the total hours lost in each province due to load shedding.

DA MP Christopher Roos, who raised the query, expressed concern over the significant number of lost working hours, highlighting its potential impact on service delivery.

“This despite for tens of million of rands being spent on equipment upgrade, communication upgrades at Home Affairs offices. And the minister of Home Affairs needs to start pretending to care for our people at least, and head to the DA’s request to have the system down-time status displayed on the Home Affairs website so that while at least they try to sort the issue out, that people will not have to waste their time travelling all the way to the offices, especially in places like the Eastern Cape where the issue is worse by far than any province. So people do not have to waste their time always travelling there only to find out that the system is off line and they will have to travel back and come again.”

According to June Luna, Load shedding poses a significant challenge to South Africa’s economic growth, impacting services at Home Affairs offices and hindering citizens and foreigners from accessing crucial services like death registration or obtaining passports and ID cards.

This adds to the existing downtime experienced by Home Affairs and its struggling IT system.

While generators have been installed in approximately 200 modernized offices, over 200 non-modernized offices will remain closed during load shedding in certain areas.

HOME AFFAIRS EXTENDS SERVICES WITH SATURDAY OPENINGS

Home Affairs offices will be open five hours on Saturdays from 6 April to 25 May ,except for the 27 April.

Services such as ID collection, new applications, and issuing Temporary Identity Certificates will be available. Offices will also address issues like duplicates, amendments, rectifications, and cases of individuals mistakenly marked as deceased, provided the necessary documents are provided.

The opening hours will be from 08:00 to 13:00.

According to a statement released by the Department of Home Affairs, mobile offices will resume delivering IDs in remote areas where applications were taken.

Local offices will communicate the dates, times, and venues of these visits in collaboration with stakeholders like councillors.

Mobile offices will assist the identified local offices.

Additionally, clients can now schedule appointments to collect their Smart ID Cards and Green barcoded ID books before visiting offices using the Branch Appointment Booking System (BABS).

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