The Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Siyabonga Cwele, and the Executive Mayor for the City of Johannesburg, Cllr Mr Herman Mashaba, have agreed to forge closer working relations on areas of mutual interest. This includes the City’s commitment to assist the Department in encouraging residents to collect their uncollected identity documents and addressing immigration challenges faced by the City.

 

Minister Cwele and Mayor Mashaba held a meeting as part of a service delivery monitoring visit to the Randburg Home Affairs office.

 

Minister Cwele is spearheading a programme of partnering with provincial and local governments to improve the service delivery to citizens.

 

“We need to work with councillors because they directly interact with citizens on a daily basis. In Gauteng, there are 94 000 uncollected IDs, most of these are in Johannesburg. The partnership with the City will help us to reach out to many of these people to remind them to come and collect their IDs,” said Minister Cwele. 

 

Mayor Mashaba invited Home Affairs officials to work with the City officials from early next week to fine tune a strategy to encourage people of Johannesburg to collect their IDs.

 

Minister Cwele and Mayor Mashaba also agreed on a way forward in dealing with some challenges on immigration.

 

“Since coming into office, I have worked to highlight Johannesburg’s pressing immigration challenges and their impact on all our residents. I am glad that Minister Cwele has agreed to heed our call and I hope that this will be first of many engagements which will bring solutions to these challenges,’’ said Mayor Mashaba.

 

Both Minister Cwele and Mayor Mashaba emphasized that foreign nationals who come into the country through legal means are welcome. However, those who come into the country illegally are not.