2 million waiting on Home Affairs to unblock their IDs

ONE week into the new year and more than 2 million South Africans are still waiting on Home Affairs to unblock their ID documents and thus “unblock their lives”.

The Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, in September reserved judgment in an application by Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and several other civic organisations in which it challenged the conduct of Home Affairs to block certain people’s IDs, leaving them out in the cold.

Judgment is expected to be delivered within a month or two.

LHR, which represented a host of clients whose IDs were blocked, said that in May 2012 the department initiated a campaign to address the issue of “duplicate IDs” on the National Population Register.

Initially, about 29 000 IDs were identified.

The figure escalated to about 500 000 IDs within a year.

The department reported to Parliament that the issues originated during the consolidation of apartheid-era population registers into the National Population Register before the 1994 elections.

The department distinguished between duplicate ID cases (one person sharing an ID number with multiple people) and multiple ID cases (one person assigned multiple ID numbers).

By August 2013, it published a notice of its intention to “invalidate” and “cancel” all unverified duplicate IDs by the end of 2013.

The IDs had been blocked on the National Population Register by the time they were advertised.

Lawyers for Human Rights said that the ID blocking practice had become increasingly arbitrary, affecting a growing number of people.

In the past five years, LHR has assisted more than 500 people – most marginalised, black South Africans.

It said none of them were aware of their blocked IDs until they tried to access another service.

Meanwhile, one of the people awaiting the court judgment is a man only identified as Solly. He said his ID was blocked more than a decade ago and his life changed after that.

According to him, the department is failing the poorest of the poor.

“They cannot challenge the department,” he said, questioning why it has to be taken to court to ensure that it does its job.

“If I die today, I will be buried as a pauper.”