Home Affairs holds back the economy. Here’s how

Ilook at the faces around me, and they are a smorgasbord of unhappiness. Resignation. Confusion. Frustration. Anger. Anxiety. And then there are the shoulder shruggers. This is a home affairs queue for IDs and passports on a Monday morning. I think it’s the shoulder-shruggers who get to me most because they seem to say: “It’s a black government. What more can you expect?” It’s racist logic because the apartheid bureaucracy was built to frustrate and keep black citizens down and insulated in the bantustans and group areas. The democratic home affairs should be efficient and caring as an act of decolonialism and commitment to freedom. It’s not.

Instead, the system at the Randburg office is laughable. You queue four times for a single transaction. Queue 1: get a number. Queue 2: go back outside and queue to get a photograph taken. Queue 3: see a consultant. Queue 4: pay. All the queues snake into each other, and the signage is so poor that nobody knows what to do.

An outsourced security guard takes charge, stepping into the gap while the home affairs staff stand chatting, taking tea or walking around officiously. It’s a no-system system and makes a mockery of Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba’s highfalutin bureau-speak and of the billions that go into the department’s budget. It’s even more infuriating when you know this is the same minister who smoothed the way for a number of Guptas to get their papers without queueing. And if you read the book Indentured: Behind the Scenes at Gupta TV by Rajesh Sundaram, about the start-up of the family’s TV channel, their Indian staff got permitted and passported in record time without having to queue or, indeed, even go to a home affairs office.

It would take a junior manager with common sense an hour to sort out a workable system of a single queue. With four queues, you are in for a three- to four-hour wait; that means most working people have to take leave to attend to citizen matters at the heart of their lives. The productivity drain is substantial. It could be done in 20 minutes with a few tweaks: a few more photo booths, three cashiers and full staffing.

While the home affairs budget line shows there are a substantial number of senior managers, management is poor. On this Monday, one of the photo-booth operators is off, so the queue moves at a snail’s pace because one person is seeing to hundreds of citizens.

When you get to Queue 3, things slow down even further because only two of the seven desks are operational: the rest of the staff are absent. The office manager is out, so it’s not clear who is running the show, and the staff who are working seem angry and dispirited, even in their new uniforms and shiny name tags. When you get to Queue 4 to pay, the single card machine is not working, so it’s cash only.

Gigaba may say there’s a funding crunch, but that can’t be right unless the funding is not being well-spent. The spending line on citizen services (IDs, passports, birth certificates and death certificates) is the highest on the department’s budget.

This is Johannesburg, the heart of the economy. If it’s like this here, I can’t imagine what the offices in Tzaneen or Dutywa are like. It’s my aim to find out, because to help make a more efficient home affairs system would be a great form of publicinterest journalism.

Home affairs is at the heart of the open economy and the personal economy: you need the department to get an ID. Without it, you can’t get a job or a driver’s licence, open a bank account, start a small business, get credit, or travel.

A slow and lumbering Home Affairs Department makes for a slow and lumbering economy.

The system at the Randburg office is laughable. You queue four times for one transaction