Durban — There is growing concern that load shedding could be affecting data capturing at the Department of Home Affairs after applications were allegedly deleted.
This was discovered by the DA during a visit at Bronkhorstspruit Home Affairs office in Pretoria. It has led the DA to probe this in KwaZulu-Natal.
Adrian Roos, the DA spokesperson on home affairs, said it had found cases where residents had been told to re-apply numerous times even after receiving application completion receipts.
Roos said there were cases where citizens apply for an ID or passport, complete the application and receive a valid receipt but a few weeks later when they return to the office to find out why the documents are not ready they find that the application was completely deleted due to load shedding that causes the system to go offline.
“These residents are then required to reapply. This is a completely unacceptable waste of time for these residents.
“There can be no compromise on database replication and power systems in place for secure systems that contain such sensitive information,” Roos said.
According to Roos, a detailed report which highlighted electricity and environmental issues as major causes of system downtime was presented to the department of Home Affairs in 2019.
This included uninterrupted power supply devices not kicking in, no power backup or not having fuel in generators when power fails.
He said to date, Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi has also failed to respond to the DA’s parliamentary request posed in October 2022, to list offices with no functioning generator or uninterrupted power supply system including answers to when emergency power supply systems would be installed in those offices.
During his budget vote 2022/23 speech, Motsoaledi said cable theft was a national scourge.
He said apart from downtime due to State Information Technology Agency (Sita) networks and Home Affairs, load shedding has added another burden on the shoulders of Home Affairs.
Motsoaledi stated that his department installed generators in 197 modernised offices but the remaining 215 non-modernised offices will be out of operation for the duration of load shedding in a particular area, further increasing the queues,” Motsoaledi said.
Motsoaledi stated that he knew no other government department that consumes as much internet services as Home Affairs. He said Sita had to double its internet capacity and introduced three failures located in eThekwini, Tshwane and Cape Town to ensure that if any of the network was down, there would be two to support the services.
He added that while they try to deploy mobile trucks to some areas affected by cable theft, the level of anger was always high.
“We are trying to attend to this but we wish to remind members of the public that when you see somebody stealing a cable please just realise that he is making it impossible for you to get your documents from Home Affairs on time,” said Motsoaledi.
The DA said it would be following up and conducting oversight to ensure that the issue of application deletion was addressed without delay.
Daily News