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Home Affairs officials were in parliament on Tuesday where they detailed their challenges with fellow government entity Sita.
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Long queues and slow processing times at Home Affairs offices are due to the shortcomings of the State Information Technology Agency (Sita), a parliamentary portfolio committee has heard.
On Tuesday, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) detailed the logistical issues it regularly encounters.
The department warned that cost, time and efficiency challenges would persist unless it was given the freedom to procure its own service providers.
Sita inefficiencies
A presentation given by DHA’s Chief Information Officer Leon Du Preez stressed that despite Sita’s mandate to streamline government communications, this was not the current reality.
“Sita has become a bottleneck to service delivery and has a strategic misalignment with the digital transformation needs of home affairs,” stated Du Preez.
Sita inefficiencies have delayed modernisation targets such as office upgrades, live data capture deployments, and integrated border management.
These have cybersecurity ripple effects such as a lack of real-time monitoring, virtual private network vulnerabilities and inadequate security information and incident management.
Du Preez highlighted a Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) diagnostic report showing that the department required an urgent system refresh as it was plagued by old and ageing infrastructure.
The CSIR report found critical faults in home affairs’ isolated networks and biometric systems as well as a lack of redundancy — the system’s ability to have rapid, available backup network pathways.
Procurement issues
This is a list of 12 specific service delivery and procurement issues, most notably a two-year delay in upgrading office connectivity and R42 million wasted on obsolete anti-malware software.
Du Preez noted with concern how during a lengthy infrastructure failure, the department was the first to identify the problem.
“We engaged with both [the service provider] and Sita at the time, and it was unfortunate that neither was aware of the downtime that caused the issue.
“We also noted that the redundant links were not in different trenches. In other words, they had dual links but in the same trench,” said Du Preez.
Additionally, three projects involving local area network cabling, the procurement of routers and switches and the connection of medical facilities are two years over deadline.
The inefficiencies have led to at least one service provider’s contract being terminated after failures to meet remedial action implemented since late 2024.
Plan to rely on banks
Processing identity and passport documentation is one of Home Affairs’ primary functions, and Du Preez elaborated on the department’s plans to use the private sector to assist.
“We should not be expanding, buying, or constructing additional new physical offices. We would rather leverage the banks’ infrastructure, not only in branch but also on digital platforms,” he said.
He added that banks have made a commitment to DHA that their networks are available to the department.
This would allow banks and Home Affairs to “deep link” across their respective networks when South African citizens apply for IDs and passports.
Du Preez said the engagement process began in 2015, but only 30 branches have been linked so far.
“We know that is chipping away at the problem too slowly and therefore set ourselves an ambitious target of 100 branches,” said Du Preez.
The portfolio committee’s agenda ran over time, with the chair postponing questions and comments on the presentation to a later date.
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