Borders, bureaucracy and the slow grind to right Home Affairs
Borders are to countries what good fences are to neighbours, or so one would hope. Throughout 2025, hardly a week passes without human migration dominating global news headlines. From President Donald Trump’s building-walls-to-close-borders obsession to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s bizarre ‘swap 100 for 100’ obfuscation, every country is wrestling with the ‘access’ dilemma.
Running the fact-checker gauntlet
South Africa has its own porous border challenges. But if you dare comment on how many million foreigners traipse around our country, soaking up government services already in short supply, you will find your observations fact-checked faster than you can say ‘illegal’. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the frequent reports that more than half of newborns at some border hospitals are delivered to mothers from neighbouring countries, notably Zimbabwe.
Before you reach the full stop on your ‘foreign mothers make up 50% plus of births at some Limpopo hospitals’ claim, a government spokesperson will issue a denial, despite conceding: “We do not track nationality or residency at clinics and hospitals.” The same statistical fog surrounds reporting on how many undocumented non-South Africans live here. Alarmists bandy about 15 million; more sober guesses place the figure between two and four million. Anecdotally, the number of foreigners living in informal settlements and the prevalence of non-South African Uber drivers hint that the four million tally is nearer the truth.
The role of South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs in border access management and the issuing of identity documents, passports and visas was the topic of a recent PSG Think Big Series webinar. Journalist Alishia Seckam welcomed Minister of Home Affairs, Leon Schreiber, who was described as being on a mission to overhaul the department. “From a Home Affairs perspective, we are moving at light speed,” he began. “We have a number of key reforms that are underway, and in many cases, they have already yielded fruits.” 
Smart IDs by the score
Commenting on the civic side of the department’s responsibilities, the Minister revealed that around 3.5 million smart identity cards had been issued over the past year, well above target. Perhaps these tricks could be shared with the one-printer-never-working team at the Department of Transport, LOL. He also announced an “exciting new digital partnership with banks and the banking sector” to extend certain Home Affairs services to thousands of bank branches.
Turning to legal immigration, the Minister lamented his department’s poor historic performance in issuing tourism visas. “South Africa has underperformed very badly in markets like China and India; [potential tourists] were complaining that they had to travel great distances to apply; they had to stand in long queues; they had to wait weeks for their passport with a visa to come back; and often they would miss their flight,” he said. Improved efficiencies in this area have seen a boost of around 27000 tourists over the past four or five months. Tourists can now look forward to a “really big reform” under the pending Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) banner.
Minister Schreiber was also upbeat about the 51000 deportations recorded in the latest year, the highest number in over a decade. Citizens receive the news less enthusiastically. Commenting on an article run on Moneyweb.co.za, readers held the view that celebrating a few thousand deportees was moot given the likely 10x flood of people crossing the border in the opposite direction. One reader ventured that many of these deportees were opportunists seeking a state-funded visit home. Another shared the common refrain that the country’s informal sector was awash with individuals from China, India, Pakistan and the rest of Africa.
No magic fix for legacy issues
Border security and illegal immigrants featured early on in the discussion, with the facilitator asking about the obstacles the department faced in this area. The Minister stated there was no magic fix for a set of ethics- and infrastructure-related challenges that had become ingrained over 30 years.
The solution, he said, involved focused, systematic reforms over time. Case in point, the country’s old paper-based identity document is recognised as one of the most defrauded documents on the African continent. Schreiber described the legacy ID as a “gaping wound that criminals and syndicates are able to exploit.”
A single command-and-control structure under the Border Management Agency (BMA) was held up as part of the solution. Schreiber reminded his interviewer that until recently, there were seven different government agencies and departments “doing their own things” at the border. These have now been integrated into the BMA, creating a clearer control environment. Technology could feature here too, with some success from a recent pilot programme that used drones to detect people trying to cross the border illegally.
The Minister argued that capacitating the BMA would have countless positive spin-offs, including clamping down on illicit trade, improving tax collection and reducing pressure on law enforcement countrywide. It turns out Home Affairs is desperate for more funding too. “There are a number of things that we are doing to make sure that we have the resources … to maintain the kind of systems that we require,” Minister Schreiber said. One such initiative saw the fee per query for Home Affairs’ Online Verification System (OVS) going up from 15c to R10.
Banks happy / unhappy over 6567% hike
This caused quite a stir among financial services firms such as banks and insurers. Start-up digital bank TymeBank took to the media to criticise the 6567% hike in the fee, labelling it catastrophic. But the established Capitec was largely supportive of the move. The latter told IOL that it “supports the Department of Home Affairs initiative to upgrade the National Population Register and enhance the stability and reliability of its Online Verification System.” The bank’s CEO said they would absorb the cost, and that their customers would be unaffected.
Seckam interrogated recent wins at Home Affairs in light of concerns over the fragility of the Government of National Unity (GNU) framework. “We are demonstrating just how powerful the GNU can be,” Schreiber offered. “We are working together in good faith, trying to solve real problems without [getting derailed by] high-level ideological discussions.” Perhaps so, but casual observers are always left wondering to what degree a junior GNU partner is constrained when tackling systemic administrative inefficiencies and corruption.
This writer enjoyed the Minister’s common-sense approach to tackling issues. He pointed out that failings and transgressions were being picked apart to identify root causes. “Automation and digital transformation are key in closing off the space for human bias, for human discretion and for human interference,” he said. “We are making sure that we use the technology that we have at our disposal to automate processes and to understand [what is being done] whenever someone intervenes in a process.”
Technology has its constraints
Digitisation alone cannot deliver institutional renewal, and technology cannot solve things like inadequate training, lack of basic public administration skills and the chronic constitutional illiteracy amongst frontline staff, countered Seckam.
The Minister conceded that digital transformation was merely a tool to drive institutional change. He said Home Affairs would use technology to re-engineer processes: “We are re-engineering the entire process of how the State operates in this domain, and we are able to do so because technology creates the opportunity for us to look afresh at how government services can be delivered.”
You could argue that the most important work sits outside of the porous border and illegal migration distraction. In this context, fixing the civil register by finding and documenting South Africans long left out of it emerges as a priority. “Our system has actually blocked the state from identifying people who are in the country, illegally and undocumented. So, by definition, these are people who are ghosts,” Schreiber said.
He warned that an undocumented individual is not necessarily an illegal foreigner; there are South Africans who are undocumented because of failures of the state.
Empowering enforcement agencies to act
The overarching hope is that fixing the population register, including ensuring that every identity document is linked to an individual’s biometrics, will empower Home Affairs and the country’s enforcement agencies to manage the problem of people living and working in the country illegally.
Follow the writer on
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gareth-stokes-media/
X: @stokesmedia
