Cape Town - After exhaustive attempts to see high schoolers under their care obtain identity documents, the desperate pleas of two Cape Town grans have reached as far as the Office of the Minister of Home Affairs, prompting immediate intervention.
Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber, who heard about the cases and called for the matters to be urgently addressed, presented the Smart IDs to the recipients at the Bellville Home Affairs office yesterday.
Last month, New Woodlands great-grandmother Hester Prince’s appeal for assistance was featured in the
After having been given the runaround by Home Affairs for several years, it left her great-grandson, Leo Badenhorst, 19, without an ID mere months before his final exams.
“I can’t even tell you how I feel, I can’t explain,” said an emotional 81-year-old Prince.
They had previously gone to Standard Bank on a number of occasions, and were told his mother needed to be present as he was underage at the time.
“I told them, I don’t know where the mother is. I said I raised Leo so I’m his mommy and his grandma because I raised him as a baby. Then we tried Home Affairs.
“Home Affairs sent me to the social worker for a letter and to the police station for affidavits but Home Affairs (eventually) said no, they don’t accept it, they want the mother.”
She said she would queue with her great-grandson from 5am, only to be turned away.
Badenhorst, said: “It was hard, we had to use a lot of money for travelling up and down, getting rejected and then going back home, coming back again with the hope you’re going to get an ID made but it just never happened. I feel glad because now I can at least go and do the things I need to do, open a bank account and start saving money. So I’m really happy about that.”
Marlene Wyngaard, 74, from Silvertown, caring for family member Joshlynne Europa, 17, faced a similar struggle.
“Her sister went backwards and forwards with her. Sometimes she went on her own and eventually, she said to me, ‘ma, I’m giving up’.
“I said, ‘you can’t give up.’ She even got to the point of saying, ‘I’m not going to go to school anymore because I can’t write without an ID’ and I insisted, ‘you are almost there, why do you want to give up?’ and I said, ‘you made it this far’,” said Wyngaard.
Europa said she was not able to get assistance at Home Affairs as she was without an adult, and was turned away three times this year.
“I feel happy again. It’s going to be easy to get a job so I can help my granny also.”
Schreiber said they were trying to intervene in individual cases where possible.
“We have technological solutions that we must embrace that will help us address many of these issues. So some of the things that happen, not necessarily in these specific cases, but in many cases, are simply because our officials are so overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork, the decision-making process is slow, it’s manual. This is all slowing down, complicating and, unfortunately in many cases, creating opportunities for corruption or fraud. It’s a minority of officials that engage in that kind of thing but it has a huge impact when it happens on people. And so we have to close that kind of loophole, we have to move our systems online.”
He said the challenge lay in human capacity, with the department having 40% staff shortage.
The department required 18 000 officials countrywide, but had 7 000.
Cape Argus