Home Affairs lost 77 years' worth of working hours in 5 years
17 April 2024
The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents.
Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.
The lost hours are largely due to system downtime, surpassing load-shedding. In the 2022/2023 financial year, where we experienced extensive load-shedding, system downtime was the cause of 41 691 hours lost (17 years), whereas load-shedding caused around 9 322 hours lost (4 years) at DHA civic offices on the production of smart IDs.
The DHA was quick to blame the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) which provides the DHA with ICTS support, including networking. While SITA may be partly responsible for the lost hours, what is interesting to note is that SITA’s connectivity reports for the DHA show that connectivity has increased to the DHA to an average of 99.5% in 2023/2024, but the DHA’s hours lost due to system downtime continue to increase.