By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Department of Home Affairs has issued an alert to South Africans that its services are not available at the moment due to a technical problem on the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) mainframe which affects access to the National Population Register (NPR).
Department spokesperson Siya Qoza says the issue affected home affairs offices across the country.
He said technicians and engineers were attending to the matter, and they hoped it would be resolved soon.
“The Department apologizes to citizens and clients for the inconvenience caused.”
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has called on home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi to resolve the issue speedily.
“This continues to happen, where the Department is unable to deliver services due to its system being offline,” said the DA spokesperson on Home Affairs, Angel Khanyile.
“We also call on the Department to hold SITA accountable for its inability to fix its system, which continues to persist without resolution,” Khanyile said.
In June 2021, Motsoaledi told the National Council of Provinces that Home Affairs wanted permission from National Treasury to ditch SITA and use a private IT provider.
Motsoaledi said that the IT services provided by SITA were the “original sin” of Home Affairs.
By comparing SITA’s services to the Christian doctrine of original sin, Motsoaledi implied that all of the department’s problems can be traced back to SITA.
Motsoaledi said that although other government departments may be somewhat affected by problems at SITA, it has a crippling impact on Home Affairs.
“We have done away with manual systems and introduced a live capture system about eight [now ten] years ago,” the Minister stated.
He explained that Home Affairs depends on its IT system provider because the department’s staff is not made up of IT experts.