Green Shoots: Musical chairs at Home Affairs

By Ashley Green-Thompson

I’m loving the move to online service by the Department of Home Affairs. There’s still too much of a lead-in time to secure appointments, but at least you can plan your schedule with some certainty. I used the little satellite office in Centurion a couple of years ago, and it was great. But more recently I’ve needed quick interventions – for a second passport last year, and for a temporary identity document the other day. The Home Affairs office in Sophie de Bruyn Street in Pretoria still accommodates walk-ins, although you can also make online appointments.

The experience begins with parking on the pavement, and the help of the energetic valets is important as the road is quite busy. These guys are more than just car guards. I was immediately offered the full service – R100 to get me into the building and to the front of the queue. I declined his kind offer and told him I just needed a temporary ID, which is usually quite quick. More services were offered which I don’t think are sanctioned by our Minister, so I declined again.

The building is old, but functional enough. I made my way to the third floor, and in the absence of any formal guidance worked out which queue I needed to be in, and took my seat. You must know that queueing at Home Affairs is like musical chairs – as you advance in the system you hop about from chair to chair. Standing inevitably means you have to test your powers of persuasion and convince others that you are, in fact, in the queue.

The guy next to me smelt like he’d started early with the juice. It was 10 in the morning, and this was definitely not his first stop. A young mother had found a spot with a babe in arms and a four year old. She was still there when I left, the little one finding entertainment in her imagination. Everybody is desperately obeying instructions to avoid falling foul of the officials – sit in the right queue, don’t

move the chair at the desk, concentrate on pressing your thumb properly on the little fingerprint screen, show them ALL your papers and photos and affidavits. There’s a humility that you learn quickly - the people behind the desks hold your fate in their clerical hands. Some services seem more complex. The queues for CITIZENSHIP are longer and more static than us TEMPORARY ID types.

And it is cards only for the R70 I needed to pay, limiting the temptation to have sticky fingers.

This department is vital to so much of our people’s lives, and I think it mostly works in spite of the interminable waiting. It’s done quite spectacularly for me for my passport last year – 48 hours

between the SMS confirming my application and the one telling me to collect.

Still, there are too many stories of utter frustration, of identity theft, of intransigent officials, of corruption. A well known political pundit I follow complained bitterly on social media of the Pythonesque battles he’s encountered to get a new passport. There are still too many ordinary people who suffer similar fates and worse. It’s a struggle, and hopefully our politicians and bureaucrats can be better. But to wait for them to do it takes away our agency, doesn’t it? I like to believe that we can help create a better system if we all refuse to pay the tjotjo that undermines any

attempts at building a more efficient system. We need to practice the patience to outwait the rotten ones, to challenge where we can the bureaucracy that doesn’t see people, and to encourage each other to stay strong in the face of the monolith of officialdom. After all, it’s our Home Affairs, is it not?

And then, towards the end of my two-hour sojourn, in walked a mother-daughter combo, whose first words to me were of a complaint about the lack of clarity about where to sit/queue. They were also really peeved off because they paid the R100 outside. I think it had dawned on them at this point that they were not going to get those promised services, or their money back. I had to stifle my mirth at

their exasperated mumbling “This country!” Sometimes there is justice in the world.