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6 June 2006

Chairperson,
The honourable Minister,
Honourable members:

Yesterday, 5 June, my mother turned 60 years old.

My mother is a very strong and hard working woman who has been a vital part of my life from the day I was conceived.

The circumstances of her birth determined that she would not be treated as an honoured citizen of this country and for many decades, the Department of Home Affairs would become the place where this sub-human identity would be confirmed.

As a mother, the birth of her children should have meant that they were all registered at birth in the hospital where she delivered them to enable them to access first and foremost their citizenship and the socio economic rights that attach to such citizenship.

Of course as we all know it this was not to be as citizenship of South Africa was denied both her and her children.

It had to take half her lifetime for her to reclaim her citizenship and for her children to obtain theirs.

She was lucky that her parents educated her because the coincidence of her birth as a rural African woman, should have condemned her to illiteracy, unemployment and poverty which would have determined that she would as she turned 60 years old be desperate to receive her pension in order to get some relief from the devastating poverty into which she would have been consigned by the decades of grinding poverty.

The incidence of her completing three score years yesterday and as I prepared for this debate allowed me the occasion profoundly to appreciate not only the woman that she is but also the journey traversed to liberate South Africa and the full challenge that this poses for the Department.

Despite the many mountains she had to climb, she has been fortunate to have had work and a pension and has no pressure to obtain her Identity Document (ID) or rectify it in order to earn her desperately awaited pension or claim the social grants for her grandchildren.

For millions of women in South Africa their reality is different and they are not as fortunate - for them desperation is the order of the day.

The services that the Department of Home Affairs renders to our people do not only confirm their citizenship and dignity, but also determine relief from poverty for many people who are in less fortunate situations.

They are vital in determining whether this ‘age of hope’ will bring about to full reality the promises of democracy and a better life or will remain fossilised in the present, forever the ‘age of hope’ and nothing more.

I wish to state but the obvious that the notion of the age of hope’ is not so much in the creation but in the act of creating itself. It is about the painstaking and arduous effort that should go into creating hope than celebrating the mere fact alone that we are in the age of hope.

We know that we have a major role to play in supporting the objectives of the government to fight poverty and underdevelopment, such as Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA) and Joint Initiative for Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA).

We are thus honoured today to have to present Budget Vote four before this august House; mindful of the high expectations of our people and their impatience for quality and convenient service delivery now aware of the heavy challenges they especially the poor and rural people continue everyday to confront in their quest to obtain home affairs services.

A tribute to the youth

In presenting this Budget Vote, we re-dedicate ourselves to the noble vision of the youth of 1976 and pay tribute to their heroism.

Accordingly, as our contribution to deepening youth participation in development today and together with the Department of Education and other partners, we have embarked on a national campaign targeting students to raise their level of social consciousness and civic responsibilities.

In addition to this and in order further to raise our capacity to discharge our responsibilities, we have implemented an extensive internship programme and launched on Friday, 2 June 2006, the National Youth Service Programme recruiting 300 young people for placement in the frontline offices, mobile units, Multi-purpose Community Centre (MPCCs) and hospitals.

This shall enhance both our service delivery capacity as well as youth employability.

We have also deployed the mobile units to schools in various provinces to assist the learners to obtain birth certificates and IDs. We shall continue to expand this programme and to explore further avenues to empower the youth of our country.

Building the leadership core

We have continued also to provide hands on strategic leadership to the Film Publishing Board (FPB), Government Printing Works (GPW) and Information Services Branch (ISB), consolidating the leadership and management structure, making new strategic recruitments, stemming the loss of qualified personnel and enhancing the capacity of the provinces.

We shall continue during this year with greater vigour and purpose to implement a concerted Human Resources Development (HRD) plan to continue to enhance the capacity of all these business units.

Information systems

We have continued to pursue the ideal of e-government in order to provide integrated and convenient services to citizens through the use of information systems with the intention to transform home affairs into the model user of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

In pursuit of these objectives among others we deployed 67 highly equipped mobile units, further computerised our offices at home and abroad ensured vital registration in 119 hospitals and made progress towards live capture.

We are on course to complete the back record conversion by June this year and will complete the absorption of the records into the Hanis system in 2007.

During 2006 we shall both begin to pilot the e-passport and finalise outstanding issues regarding the smart ID card.

Further to facilitate this, we shall, before the end of 2006 launch the live capture pilot project in the Northern Cape and in due course extend it to all our offices countrywide which will in the fullness of time serve to eliminate archaic manual and paper based workflow processes which have caused us many inefficiencies.

Film and Publication Board (FPB)

During this past year we adopted the turnaround strategy for the FPB and began to implement it.

We also strengthened compliance with corporate governance principles and have now among others a fully functional audit committee and we had a clean report in the previous financial year.

We continued to raise national focus on the campaign against child pornography, further raising its profile throughout the country through a variety of activities including conducting training for Public Prosecutors forging strategic partnerships and recruiting more compliance monitors.

We are happy to report that compliance with the Act in general has drastically improved and mobile phone operators adopted a code of good practice further to protect the children. We shall seek further ways to bring broadcasters and the print media within the classification framework and shall consider whether we should not totally ban cellular phone pornography.

We shall also finalise this year the long promised Ministerial Task Team on child pornography and shall take further steps to enhance FPB compliance with corporate governance by implementing the recommendations of the forensic audit and recommending comprehensive legislative amendments which will also impact on the structure of the board.

The Government Printing Works (GPW)

We have continued to take new and further strides to strengthen, re-position and transform the GPW.

In regard to the conversion of the GPW we shall soon take to Cabinet our recommendations with regarding to converting this organisation into an efficient and effective specialist security printing agency.

To ensure maximum security printing of all security items in conditions requisite to support the processes of such scale, we shall complete the relocation of GPW to a specially designed complex by December 2007.

We intend to move the production and printing of all security documents under the precincts of the GPW to ensure that it happens under maximum security in order drastically to enhance the integrity of the process as a whole.

GPW working with home affairs is developing additional and more complex security features for all our security documents and are working towards enhancing all round security both in terms of systems and processes of printing and production.

We wish to seize this opportunity to issue a clarion call to all our people to respect and protect their identity and passport documents which results among others in many undeserving people fraudulently obtaining our citizenship and thus polluting the national population register.

Furthermore, we must appeal to every South African to apply for regular passports in order to eliminate the need for temporary passports which we may in time have to do away with as this system is greatly abused, difficult to manage and is causing us enormous security and integrity challenges internationally.

We have also approved a major machinery and equipment replacement program of about R95 million that will catapult the GPW into a new level on par with its peers.

The forensic audit was completed and action shall continue to be taken during this financial year through involving relevant law enforcement agencies and at the same time taking necessary disciplinary action against certain members.

Further to these we shall complete the development of a comprehensive transformation strategy which should include developing unique capabilities in order to expand GPW into Africa as well as research and development capacity.

Conclusion

To the millions of youth, children and women of South Africa who yearn for a drastic improvement in the quality of their lives we know that we still have a mountain to climb to ensure that the services we deliver to them which they expect of us to take them beyond the age of hope into the age of real people’s power!

To my mother, a happy birthday day mom!

I wish to thank the Minister, the staff of the Ministry, the Director-General (DG) and his entire team, as well as the CEOs of the FPB and GPW, the Chairperson of the Select Committee and the entire Committee, as well as my wife, Thabo and family for all their support.

Thank you!

Issued by: Ministry of Home Affairs
6 June 2006