Minister Leon Schreiber: Digital transformation will revolutionise Home Affairs

Good morning, ladies and gentleman.

It is an honour to speak at this esteemed institution today on a topic that is not only central to all of our lives, but which has profound implications for the future of our country.

Today, I will outline my vision for the total, irrevocable and unprecedented transformation of the Department of Home Affairs into a digital-first, world-class institution.

What you will hear from me today will hopefully mirror what you are already seeing and reading about Home Affairs under the Government of National Unity.

Instead of the politics of soundbites, or the politics of populism, what has started to emanate from this Department is the politics of deep and meaningful institutional reform.

My passion for the politics of institutional reform is personal, as I spent the first few years of my career working at Princeton University on this exact problem: how to reform ailing government institutions in developing countries like ours?

For five years, I travelled to dozens of countries across Africa and Asia, researching examples of successful reform, speaking to senior political leaders and technocrats, and learning valuable lessons along the way.

Now, it is my mission to apply what I have learnt right here at home, in Home Affairs.

For I believe that if we can demonstrate that even a department as maligned as Home Affairs can work and even thrive, we will restore the belief that South Africa as a whole can work and thrive.

And the key to making that happen - to revolutionising Home Affairs and to redefining the very meaning of government in South Africa - lies in embracing digital transformation.

For too long, our government institutions were either actively hollowed out or, at the very least, allowed to slowly decay, usually through a combination of deliberate corruption or simple neglect.

For far too long, political leaders have been disinterested in doing the hard yards of institutional reform, instead lurching from one crisis to the next in the hope that populist soundbites would fix our accelerating problems.

What we have experienced in South Africa for too long, is a form of institutional vandalism.

Instead of maintaining and enhancing them, we have allowed our public entities to be stripped away, piece by piece, like the railway tracks at Transnet.

This vandalism rapidly accelerated during the period of state capture, which itself was the product of complicity and disinterest on the part of those entrusted to safeguard our public institutions.

It is this process of institutional vandalism that explains the state of the Home Affairs we have today.

And yet, even throughout the period institutional vandalism, there were people inside these organisations who protected what they could.

Who kept trying to innovate under conditions of either malign destruction, or benign neglect.

Can you imagine what it must be like to be an honest, dedicated Home Affairs official in a situation where your clients stand outside in the rain or heat for six hours, only for you to have to tell them that the system is offline once they reach the front of the queue?

In addition to being an enormous waste of resources, it is also profoundly disrespectful to treat human talent and potential in this way.

And it is precisely out of my respect for the human beings inside this organisation, that we must urgently embrace technological solutions.

I am greatly encouraged that I have already found many of these people inside Home Affairs.

The people who keep trying to solve problems in spite of overwhelming obstacles.

As I have already told those officials: my job is to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of reform.

Because the reality is that, after being financially gutted over the years, Home Affairs currently has only 40% of the staff is requires to function optimally.

The most question we face in this department is: where will the other 60% come from we need to function at 100%?

It is certainly not coming from Treasury, or from hard-pressed taxpayers. Which means that we simply must do more with the little we have.
Luckily, in the great age of machine learning, artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution, we have all the tools we need right at our fingertips.

All that is required, is vision, leadership, and a true and sincere commitment to reform. Not political point-scoring, personal agendas, or territorialism.

But a genuine commitment to reform that solves the actual problems that our clients experience every day, including through collaboration and innovation.

Instead of institutional vandalism, we have now embarked on the path of institutional reform.

It is important to note that the aim of this administration is not simply reconstruction - to restore Home Affairs to the somewhat more functional state it was in 15 years ago.

For me, that is far too limited an ambition.

What I am talking about is reform, which fundamentally and forever alters the trajectory of this organisation - and this country.

I am not interested in defining the vision for the future of this Department according to the standards that existed at Home Affairs before the 29th of May 2024.

I believe we can emulate the benchmark set by excellent government institutions in South Africa, like the Reserve Bank and the Revenue Service.

Indeed, my vision is even more bold - some would say brazen - than that: I want Home Affairs to become the best at what it does in the entire world.

Now, when you hear this for the first time, you should be sceptical.

After all, we are talking here about a department that still issues paper-based, hand- written visas.

A department where systems are offline too much, where queues are long, and where the space for human discretion allows organised syndicates to commit the most egregious forms of corruption.

Built on a system that has so many gaps that allow for human intervention that our very South African identity becomes a corrupt commodity that is traded, abused and trampled upon every day.

But it is precisely because this is our starting point, that I take pride in saying that what we at #TeamHomeAffairs aim to achieve over the next few months and years, is the most daringly ambitious vision South Africa has seen in a generation.

Our vision is to take an antiquated, paper-based, manual, vulnerable and demoralised organisation, and turn it into a modern, user-friendly, automated, secure, world-class and - most importantly - proud - institution that delivers dignity to all.

At the heart of turning this vision into a reality, will be an end-to-end digital platform that processes all applications, adjudications and communications between the people of South Africa and their Home Affairs department.

The result of building this platform will ensure that every function that Home Affairs provides becomes available online to every citizen through a secure portal, similar to the online banking portals that have become ubiquitous in our society.

Through the simple use of existing facial and fingerprint recognition tools, including the Face ID and fingerprint functions we all use every day on smartphones, we can create a secure profile for every citizen and every person wishing to visit South Africa.

Just think about the possibilities.

Firstly, if we get this right, it would eliminate the need for anyone to physically visit a Home Affairs office for routine transactions.

In turn, this would transform the working environment of our staff by enabling them to not only do their existing jobs well, but to also engage in far more interesting and productive tasks.

This would include devoting our staff to serving those who truly need it most, including the poorest members of our society, people in rural areas, the 10% of South Africans who don't yet use smart devices, and those exceptional or complicated cases that require more resources to resolve.

I invite you to join me in imagining the possibilities that would flow from such an integrated digital platform.

Once an application is submitted online - whether for an ID, a passport, a certificate or a visa - a risk engine built on the latest machine learning technology will check that the application is complete, verify the authenticity of the user, analyse supporting documents for fraud, run facial recognition on uploaded photos and cross-reference with various databases, process cashless transactions and - in the case of a legitimate application - communicate the outcome to the user.

All of this would happen within a matter of seconds.

No more standing in queues, no more waiting months of years for an outcome, no more being kept in the dark about the status of an application, and no more space for officials or syndicates to solicit bribes for a transaction to be processed.

Once we have this in place, there is also no logical reason why we cannot offer a service where IDs and passports are delivered to the door of the applicant anywhere in the world - again, exactly like we already do in the banking sector with debit and credit cards.

The same goes for attracting skills, capital and tourism.

For example, a tourist from a country like China - which registered over 100 million outbound trips last year of which only 0.093% came to South Africa - would receive a digital bar-coded visa in both PDF form and in their smartphone wallet within seconds after submitting a legitimate application.

When they arrive in South Africa, their full biometrics would be captured at the airport within seconds to enable a track-and-trace system from the time they enter to the time they depart.

No more interactions with foreign missions, no more mountains of paper-work, and no more space for human discretion and corruption.

In fact, it is only through the total digital transformation of Home Affairs that we can win the war on corruption in this sector.

As I recently told Parliament: South Africa's national security will remain severely compromised for as long as we allow manual, paper-based and hand-written processes.

If you don't believe me, just look at what I recently told Parliament about syndicates selling South African passports for R45 000.

The reason we know about cases like these is because the department is working closely with the Special Investigating Unit to put these criminals behind bars.

Seven officials involved in so-called photo swopping - where a document is vandalised to show the face of a different person from the rightful owner - have recently been sentenced to 80 years in prison, with more convictions on the way, and 109 more cases under investigation.

However, despite this progress, the reality is that the current manual system makes it hard for honest applicants to be served effectively, while opening too many side-doors for dishonesty.

It is a system that leaves too much room for people to disincentivise honest interaction, and incentivise dishonesty.

In the simplest example, an official can simply pick up a paper file and put it under their desk, demanding a bribe in exchange for processing the application.

This is only possible because that file is paper-based and subject to human interference.

Or take the recent case of the 95 Libyans who entered the country. They did so with paper-based, hand-written visas.
Despite this, the visas were valid because we are still using an outdated system that accepts such practices.

If we had a digital process in place that does not allow hand-written and paper-based applications, those Libyans would never have obtained visas, for the simple reason that you cannot click "submit" on a website unless you have uploaded all documentation or selected the appropriate category you are applying for.

It is these gaps in the system that enable human beings to light the fires of corruption.

In response, honest officials in Home Affairs have become firefighters, running from one fire to the next.

As I told Parliament recently: these cases of corruption will keep happening, over and over and over again, and these fires will keep burning forever, until we use digital transformation to eliminate human discretion.

In the new world we want to build for Home Affairs, a secure digital system will flag fraudulent documents faster and more effectively than human eyes ever could, while also delivering outcomes to legitimate applicants in the blink of an eye.

It will close all processes off to human intervention, from beginning to end, so that no one can pick up a paper file and demand a bribe in exchange for processing it.

The choice before us is simple: allow the fires of corruption to consume our sovereignty, or remove human discretion from the system to deal a death blow to corruption in Home Affairs.

I know which option I choose. Ladies and gentleman,

Our vision for Home Affairs is both revolutionary - and just plain common sense. And the best part is that we already have an example of how this could work.
The end-to-end digital platform I just described to you already exists at a very special institution in South Africa.

That institution is called the South African Revenue Service.

Within the blink of an eye, the SARS platform is able to differentiate tax submissions that are genuine from those that raise red flags.

That is why five million people get their assessments instantly via email after clicking "submit."

However, that same system also has the capacity to instantly spot irregularities, which are then referred to SARS employees for auditing.

At its core, the process flow at Home Affairs is exactly the same as at SARS.

This means that we have an inspiring example right here in South Africa from which we can learn, and with whom we wish to collaborate.

The other good news is that we also know that Home Affairs is capable of this type of reform.

In the period around the 2010 Soccer World Cup, and in collaboration with SARS, the department introduced Smart IDs and created the process we currently use for ID cards and passports, which made a meaningful difference to processing times for those two documents.

The problem is that those initial reforms were not sustained and expanded.

Instead, they were followed by the institutional vandalism and stagnation of state capture.

The ironic result of all this, however, is that Home Affairs now has an opportunity to not only catch up - but to leapfrog into the future.

Precisely because the reform process stalled over the past decade, we now have the chance to learn from the experience of an institution like SARS.

Keeping in mind that there is no magic wand to fix all our problems overnight, if we manage this process carefully, Home Affairs does have the potential to leapfrog and become a world-leading digital-first organisation.

A reformed Department of Home Affairs would secure our national sovereignty by restoring the integrity of our population register and bullet-proofing our civics and immigration systems against corruption.

It would deliver dignity to all citizens and redefine government as we know it, by offering the same security and convenience we today associate with online banking.

And, most importantly, it would turn Home Affairs into the most powerful economic enabler in the entire South Africa.

National Treasury has already found that, after eliminating load shedding, attracting critical skills to our country is the second most powerful step we can take to create jobs.

Research has also demonstrated that attracting about eleven thousand more highly skilled individuals to work in our companies every year, would boost GDP growth by up to 1.2% and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Similarly, growing tourism by just 10% would add 0.6% to annual GDP growth and create tens of thousands more jobs.

This means that transforming Home Affairs into a digital-first organisation that restores national security while attracting skills, capital and tourism can single-handedly triple South Africa's annual economic growth rate from the paltry 0.6% we currently experience.

This one statistic alone demonstrates why we should all rally behind the vision to digitally transform Home Affairs to deliver dignity.

Because nothing delivers dignity, like a job.

And creating jobs through rapid economic growth is the apex priority for the Government of National Unity.

In conclusion, I say this to you: the scale of the challenges we face in Home Affairs, is eclipsed only by the extent of the opportunities before us.

If we are empowered and supported to deliver on our vision for this department, we will restore the hope that South Africa's best days are still to come.

Because if even Home Affairs can be made to work, we will restore the hope that South Africa can work.

Thank you.

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