War on queues moves slowly

The department of home affairs campaign to make its branches more efficient is off to a slow start.

Labelled the war on queues‚ the campaign was launched in April to improve the waiting time at home affairs offices.

But there have been some glitches. Home affairs minister Malusi Gigaba said on Monday there were signs of progress.

Gigaba claimed that, on average, a home affairs office took 25 to 30 minutes to fully process a client.

“Currently‚ we have noted that even those that have applied online are still not prioritised when they get to our offices; they still stand in queues [the same] as those doing walk-in applications‚” he said.

“The biggest contributor to system downtime is unavailability of power in many offices‚ where uninterrupted power supply and the generator failed to switch [on].”

Offices experience an average of 20 days’ system downtime a month due to power interruptions and problems with Telkom lines.

Gigaba said IT company Dimension Data had been hired to assess its networks at the department’s 184 live capture offices.

He said a full skills audit for all office managers was at an advanced stage and provincial leaders were implementing specific interventions to deal with queues in their areas.