Home Affairs offices lost 13,867 hours to system failures last year

Home Affairs offices lost 13,867 hours to system failures in the past financial year, minister Leon Schreiber told Parliament in a written reply.

A further 11,479 hours were lost to failures on the national population register, the database that holds every birth, death, marriage and identity number in the country.

But Schreiber also told Parliament that the department could not say how much time the public had actually lost, because it has never been able to measure it.

“The department is not yet able to provide a technically validated quantitative measure of the total elapsed time during which Home Affairs services were unavailable nationally from June 30 2024,” he said.

“The current monitoring tools record incidents separately across networks, infrastructure, applications, biometric platforms, the national population register and external service providers.

“They do not yet measure the availability of a service across the complete transaction path, from the office or citizen-facing channel through all underlying systems and integrations.”

The figures came in a reply to EFF member Thapelo Mogale, who had asked how many hours had been lost since Schreiber was sworn in on June 30 2024, which provinces and offices were worst hit, and what was being done about it.

What the department could produce were the daily records kept by provinces of production hours lost at front offices.

Front-office hours lost fell from 35,426 in 2024/25, a 61% improvement, while population register hours fell from 14,720, a 22% improvement.

Schreiber said those provincial records showed what offices were experiencing but did not amount to a national measurement.

“These records provide an important indication of the impact experienced at office level but are not equivalent to national elapsed downtime,” he said.

“For example, downtime experienced simultaneously by several offices is accumulated as multiple office-hours.

“The figures may also include partial interruptions where some services remained available.”

Every province recorded a drop in general front-office downtime.

North West was the worst affected last year with 2,460 hours lost, followed by Gauteng on 2,296 and KwaZulu-Natal on 2,291.

On the population register, Limpopo lost the most at 3,707 hours, ahead of KZN on 2,101 and North West on 1,562.

Three provinces went backwards on that measure, with KZN, North West and the Northern Cape all recording more lost hours than the year before.

Schreiber said the provincial figures were being used to direct where the department put its resources, but should not be treated as a league table.

“Differences in the number of offices, local infrastructure and reporting practices mean that they should not yet be regarded as a definitive comparative measure of provincial service availability,” he said.

The department’s service level with the State Information Technology Agency was upgraded from bronze to silver, 226 links were moved onto fibre and 12 onto LTE, and 69 old Diginet lines are still to be replaced.

A total 182 offices were moved off the legacy desktop system, 48 core application servers were replaced, and a power supply fault at the biometric verification facility was fixed.

By May this year, 439 offices had been shifted onto the HANIS biometric platform, with 121 still running on ABIS and awaiting migration.

Schreiber said a new monitoring system was being built that would show whether a service was working from the public’s side of the counter.

“This will enable accurate reporting of service availability, incident duration, affected offices and the underlying causes of downtime,” he said.