No record of woman’s five children, but some have IDS
A MANENBERG mother of five and grandmother to nine has been shocked to discover that the Department of Home Affairs has no record that she has had children.
Charmaine Jansen, 50, of Manenberg, said that four of her children had ID books and birth certificates as proof that they were registered with the department when they were born.
But when her 19-year-old daughter, Arieska, applied for an ID book, Jansen found there was no record of her children.
She had first been alerted when her husband visited the Mitchells Plain offices of the Home Affairs Department last year.
An official told him that the couple’s children were “not in the system”.
Jansen said that at the time she had not paid much attention to the warning.
But she was taken aback when she and her daughter went to the Wynberg offices of the Department of Home Affairs in August and were told by the staff that there was no record in their computer system of Jansen’s children.
She said that at the time Home Affairs staff told her they had introduced a new computer system and there might have been a complica- tion with her details. They advised Jansen to go to the department’s offices in Cape Town.
“All my children were registered at the Cape Town department, so I thought it made sense to go there,” she said.
But when she went there she was once again told there was no record of her children, only this time the staff attributed the problem to recent flood damage at the Home Affairs centre.
Jansen said her daughter was unemployed and they needed to apply for a social grant, but were not able to do so without a birth certificate, which they could not obtain without having an ID for Arieska.
Home Affairs official Manusha Pillai confirmed there had been a pipe burst at the Cape Town offices during December 2009, but said that none of the mainframe computer systems had been affected.
Pillai said Home Affairs had begun linking Jansen’s details to those of her children in 1998.
“It is possible that Arieska’s ID number was not coupled to her mother’s ID number when her birth certificate was issued,” she said.
Pillai advised Jansen to contact the provincial head office to clear up the matter.