Leon Schreiber signals new dawn for home affairs

New home affairs minister Leon Schreiber has pledged to address challenges plaguing the department with a determined and innovative approach.

“This is a portfolio with a mountain of work but I’ve got my boots on so I’m ready to tackle that,” Schreiber said in an interview with Newzroom Afrika.

He was appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa on Sunday. 

Schreiber acknowledged widespread issues with visa processing, long queues and the notorious “system offline” problem, which have frustrated South Africans for years, emphasising the need for significant reforms to improve efficiency.

“Most South Africans understand the problems at home affairs, the endless queues they sometimes face [because] of this terrible South Africanism called ‘system offline’ and I am passionate about starting with those sort of basics.

“I want the system to be online; I don’t want it to be offline. I want the queues to shorten and eventually [be eliminated],” said Schreiber.

His predecessor, Aaron Motsoaledi, late last year appealed to Ramaphosa for more money to employ staff as the department battled to clear visa backlogs. According to the department, about 75,000 foreign nationals applied for SA temporary residence visas last September and the department struggled to clear the backlog.

Schreiber said: “The visa 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 SA in places where we have scarce skills or people with exception skills but also in the day-to-day operations.”

He 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,” said Schreiber.

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