Minister admits to 13 867 hours lost in Home Affairs services

Minister Schreiber has admitted that 13,867 hours of service were lost in Home Affairs since his swearing-in on June 30, 2024. This downtime amounts to 578 full days. An additional 11,479 hours were wasted due to failures in the national population register, the database containing all birth, death, marriage, and identity records.

However, Schreiber informed Parliament that it remains unclear how much time citizens have actually lost, as the department has never been able to quantify this figure. Home Affairs' current monitoring tools track incidents separately across networks, infrastructure, applications, biometric platforms, the population register, and external service providers.

They do not yet measure the availability of a service across the entire transaction path, from the office or citizen-facing channel through all underlying systems and integrations. The figures provided were daily records from provinces detailing production hours lost at front offices. These numbers have improved significantly compared to the previous year, with front-office hours lost falling 61% and population register hours down by 22%.

North West province experienced the most downtime, with 2,460 hours lost, followed by Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. Limpopo suffered the most losses in the population register, with 3,707 hours. The department has taken steps to address the issues, such as upgrading their service level with the State Information Technology Agency, moving 226 links to fiber and 12 to LTE, and replacing 69 old Diginet lines.

They have also moved 182 offices away from the legacy desktop system, replaced 48 core application servers, and fixed a power supply fault at a biometric verification facility. A new monitoring system is being developed to accurately report service availability, incident duration, affected offices, and the root causes of downtime.