According to the department, about 75,000 foreigners applied for South African temporary residence visas last September and the department struggled to clear the backlog.
“The visas issue is one of many priorities we need to tackle in this department. The most important one of those is getting the basics right and those basics relate not only to the processing of visas that can serve as an economic catalyst for South Africa in places where we have scarce skills or people with exception skills but also in the day-to-day operations.”
Schreiber highlighted the economic impact of these inefficiencies.
“I serve on the council of Stellenbosch University and we have lost academics who had to leave the country because they were not able to get the documents they needed. Those are the sort of economic impacts we can have if we tackle this issue.”
For Schreiber, the mission is not just about operational efficiency but also about restoring dignity to the home affairs experience.
“Home affairs is what makes us all South African. We get our ID documents there, it’s the first government department we interact with when our parents go to collect our birth certificates and it is also the last one that touches our lives if our loved ones have to go and collect a certificate when we pass away.
“It’s fundamentally about dignity and our identity.”
TimesLIVE
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