Minister vows to get tough
2009-06-26 18:21
Cape Town - Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on Friday vowed to fire "lots of" officials in a campaign to clean up her corruption-ridden department.
Speaking during debate on the home affairs budget vote in the National Assembly, she also announced details of a new drive to improve security and speed up her much-criticised department's issuing of documents.
"Although there are thousands of hard working, honest civil servants at home affairs, unfortunately there are lots of corrupt officials who work with syndicates, corrupt members of the public and sometimes corrupt private security members and some businesses.
"On our part, we are determined to root out all the corrupt officials wherever they are," she said.
The former foreign minister said laziness would not be tolerated either.
"Because if you earn a government salary and you have not done a good day's work, you are just as dishonest," she warned.
Birth certificate drive
Dlamini-Zuma told MPs her department would embark on a drive to issue birth certificates to all South Africans under the age of 16 by the end of 2011.
"This will eventually do away with late registration of births... This campaign is crucial because it is very clear to us that late registration of birth is the entry point for those who want to acquire South African documents fraudulently."
By facilitating the issue of identity documents, it would also remove the pressure of issuing thousands of IDs at election time, and speed up the issuing of lost or stolen documents.
Implementing new ID card system
More technology would be introduced to improve the security of IDs - including the use of digitised photographs - and of birth, marriage and death certificates.
The minister said she would implement "often-postponed" plans to introduce the "smart" or State Information Technology (SITA) ID card, and clean up the Home Affairs National Information System (HANIS) database.
In addition, she vowed to wipe out the backlog in issuing passports by the end of next month.
Dlamini-Zuma blamed delays on departmental failures, saying the bottleneck in travel documents was caused by "official tardiness in putting in place an effective personal information system that matches the high security requirements of the passport".
- SAPA