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BL Premium reports that Department of Home Affairs (DHA) Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has announced a series of measures to deal with long queues at DHA offices, mainly caused by system downtime.
He acknowledged the frustration and anger caused by this “unsavoury state of affairs” in his budget vote speech in parliament Tuesday, and said among the measures was securing the services eight IT specialists from a leading bank to help stabilise the department’s network. “We believe that the partnerships with the banks will rapidly reduce the skills deficit and assist the department to improve and maintain system uptime,” he said. Motsoaledi also announced that the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) would spend R400m to revamp the DHA’s entire network, which would be concluded in the third quarter. The agency has also doubled the department’s internet capacity and introduced a backup system in Tshwane, Cape Town and eThekwini. New offices are being built and departmental offices will be set up in malls – starting in Pretoria, Johannesburg, eThekwini and Cape Town – from September to avoid queuing outside and to provide parking. The department will also hire an additional 764 employees, 517 of whom will be front-office staff and 288 will be immigration officers. An additional 12 members of staff including analysts, researchers and investigators were being added to the anti-corruption unit, Motsoaledi said. Digitisation of records is under way and that will also alleviate long queues.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Linda Ensor at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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