System outages lead to Home Affairs backlogs

Frequent system outages at the George branch of the Department of Home Affairs are causing backlogs in client service, frustrating hundreds of clients who have to queue for hours.

- Alida de Beer

There are other frustrations, such as in the case of a local father who has been battling for two weeks to collect his son's ID after receiving an SMS that it was ready for collection.

However, when they got there, the officials told them the system was offline.

On one of their attempts, they arrived to find the office closed. On the door was a notice indicating early closure due to capacity constraints. "The date had just been changed from a previous day when they had also been closed."

With each visit, the man's son had to be taken out of school.

"This is unacceptable. As taxpayers, we demand that basic services like these are available during working hours," he said.