Duplicate ID battle continues

2011-10-12 21:57

 

Cape Town - Home Affairs eliminated more than 84 000 illegal "duplicate" identity documents (IDs) over the past year, but a further 130 000 remain to be tracked down, the department said on Wednesday.

"The resolved duplicates for the year in question [2010/11] were 84 500," deputy director-general of civic services Vusumuzi Mkhize told journalists at Parliament.
Responding to questions on the department's 2010/11 annual report, he said people with duplicate IDs fell into one of two categories: those who had two ID books; and those who "shared" or had the same ID number.
The 84 500 total included both.
On the scale of the outstanding problem, Mkhize said the department had a problem tracing people.
"We have a challenge tracing people who have the same ID number. There are still 37 000 people we are trying to track."
There were many more with multiple IDs.
"There are also 99 700 people with multiple ID numbers," he said.
According to the annual report, the duplicate ID problem "will require more than one year to resolve".
It found two main causes of the problem: "reference book holders issued with ID numbers during the apartheid regime without consultation and confirmation of their birth registration details"; and the wrong classification of fingerprints in the manual fingerprint system.
On illegal foreigners in South Africa, director general Mkuseli Apleni said 55 825 were deported during the past financial year.
Asked how many illegal foreigners the department estimated were still in the country, he said South Africa's porous borders made it impossible to determine the number undocumented foreigners.
Earlier, the department briefed members of Parliament's home affairs portfolio committee on its 2010/11 report, the first in 16 years to receive an unqualified audit opinion.
In a statement on Wednesday, committee chairperson Maggie Maunye said MPs appreciated the "hard work and dedication" of the department in managing a clean-up of its finances.

- SAPA

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