Ladies and gentlemen,

We are fast approaching the mid-term mark of the Seventh Administration, under the Government of National Unity.

Twenty-seven months ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed me as South Africa’s eleventh Minister of Home Affairs.

At the time, this portfolio was universally regarded as a “poisoned chalice.”

Wherever I went, this same phrase was used to describe a government department that had sadly become known as “Hell Affairs.”

In those early days, it was easy to see why.

More than any other department, Home Affairs had become synonymous with public sector failure.

Millions of South Africans associated it with taking an entire day out of their lives just to travel to one of the 329 Home Affairs offices in the country.

When they arrived there, they stood in queues that snaked around the block, filled in paper forms, and often faced the dreaded words: “system offline.”

In too many cases, they had to do it all over again the next day.

This was mirrored by what I found behind the scenes.

In government, everything functions according to submissions that need to be signed off by the relevant Minister.

In the case of Home Affairs, there were literally thousands of submissions waiting for me to process.

This included everything from correspondence to countless court cases, to visa appeals and waiver applications.

Astonishingly, every one of these submissions came in the form of printed paper files, each running into dozens or hundreds of pages.

Day after day, I watched these submissions arrive at the office in large cardboard boxes – the type you would normally only use when moving house.

As tends to be the case with bureaucracy that had been in place since time immemorial, Home Affairs submissions were apparently immune to the invention of the personal computer, the internet, the laptop and the smartphone.

This small daily example was a metaphor for the wider challenge we faced.

Far more serious was the backlog of over 306 000 visa applications – many of them also in paper form – that had not been processed for up to a decade.

These applications were scattered across literally thousands of cardboard boxes in storage at the department’s head office in Pretoria.

In turn, this was leading to a flood of litigation that threatened to overwhelm Home Affairs.

Even worse was the state of IT infrastructure.

The live capture system used to process Smart ID and Passport applications was on the verge of collapse.

Over a quarter of a million ID applications were simply stuck in limbo.

While a substantial part of this was caused by network failures, it also quickly became clear that there were extensive failures in IT management – including the decision by the State Information Technology Agency, during the state capture era, to switch biometric providers to the tainted EOH.

Additionally, the President had issued a proclamation in February 2024 for the Special Investigating Unit to launch a probe into the syndicates that had corrupted the department’s outdated and paper-based visa processes over a period of twenty years, undermining both national security and economic development in the process.

But all of this was overshadowed by one particular failure that struck at the very heart of our constitutional project.

The single most upsetting fact I grappled with during those early months, is that millions of South Africans remain undocumented in their own country.

For centuries, our country was defined by practice and legislation that explicitly refused to recognise millions of South Africans as full and equal citizens in the country of their birth.

In 1994, our transition to democracy created new laws which, on paper, finally regarded all South Africans as equal citizens.

However, 32 years later, millions of people have still not experienced this change, because the State had failed to provide them with the enabling documents they need to prove that they are South African.

This not only excludes citizens from access to vital services, including banking, social grants and even applying for a job.

It also serves as a powerful demonstration of how the failure to embrace reform and modernisation holds back the full development of our country, and robs its people of the dignity and equality promised by the Constitution.

I think we can all agree that, by any standard, stepping up to lead an organisation out of this situation can already be described as a mammoth task.

But the job at Home Affairs was even greater still.

The formation of the GNU came right in the middle of the annual budget vote cycle in Parliament, where it was revealed that the department was underresourced by 60%.

This meant that Home Affairs had only 40% of the staff and money it needed to deliver on its existing brick-and-mortar, manual and paper-based service delivery model.

Yet even if 60% more money suddenly fell out of the sky – which, of course, wasn’t going to happen – that would still not be enough.

Even if every single one of the 329 existing Home Affairs offices were upgraded to work perfectly.

Even if the immigration function was adequately staffed.

And even if more funding was provided to the newly-formed Border Management Authority, which, along with Government Printing Works, also resides within this portfolio.

It would still not have been enough to adequately serve 63 million South Africans and over 10 million visitors annually.

This is what makes the Home Affairs ecosystem unique.

We provide the operating system for all of government.

Out of the 257 municipalities, the over 90 provincial government departments and agencies, as well as the hundreds of national departments and entities – only one directly serves every single citizen, resident and visitor to South Africa.

Home Affairs.

In turn, the work of this department enables the delivery of most other government services, because everything from social grants to education is premised on knowing the identity of every South African citizen.

To deliver on this extraordinary responsibility, Home Affairs must therefore provide enabling documentation to every citizen, visas to millions of visitors, immigration services to every legitimate traveller, and security against every attempted illegitimate movement.

Once you stepped back to consider this reality, it was nonsensical to think that 63 million citizens, in the 25th largest country on earth, could ever be served effectively at just 329 physical locations.

The task at hand is therefore not actually to fix Home Affairs as it had existed previously.

It is to radically reform the model itself, by replacing centralised, physical processes with decentralised, digital access.

This is the key insight that shapes our vision to deliver Home Affairs @ home through digital transformation.

As we worked to turn this vision into concrete deliverables, it became clear that we had homegrown resources we could draw upon.

For decades, banks had worked exactly like Home Affairs.

A bank used to keep your savings at a centralised location, requiring you to travel great distances and fill-in paper forms just to access your own money.

In the same way, Home Affairs made it just as difficult to access your own personal information.

But look at the banking sector today.

Very few people now regularly visit physical bank branches to transact, because the banking process has been digitally transformed through biometric technology to provide secure, decentralised access to clients wherever they are in the world.

What we have done over the past two-and-a-half years, is to blaze a new trail that applies a similar principle within the decidedly more difficult context of a public sector department long associated with the opposite of innovation, modernisation and cutting-edge technology – under the unprecedented political conditions of a coalition government.

Instead of forcing millions of citizens to come to us, we are unlocking the power of technology to bring our services closer to the citizens.

As we mark the halfway point of this administration, I am proud to report that we are not only on track to deliver on the vision of Home Affairs @ home – but that we are ahead of schedule.

At the beginning of this term, we identified three key projects that would serve to anchor our reform programme.

Decentralising and expanding access to physical documents like Smart IDs and Passports to one thousand bank branches, introducing an Electronic Travel Authorisation platform to digitalise and secure the visa process from beginning to end, and building a Digital Identity system that enables South
Africans to access Home Affairs documents directly through their smartphone.

At the time, it was my belief that delivering these three key projects – as well as the underlying systemic reform that would be required to build them – would take a full five-year term in office.

However, thanks to the incredible Ministry team we have built.

The unwavering commitment of Deputy Minister Njabulo Nzuza and his office.

Director-General Tommy Makhode, Commissioner Michael Masiapato, CEO Alinah Fosi and their senior management teams.

As well as the invaluable support from Minister Enoch Godongwana and our partners at National Treasury, the South African Revenue Service and in the private sector.

I can today announce that Home Affairs is now so far ahead of schedule on our reform journey that we are raising our ambitions beyond anything that would have seemed possible just twenty-seven months ago.

As a result, I will today outline not only how we intend to finish the work on our three key projects.

I will also introduce ground-breaking new priorities for 2027 and beyond.

Given the unique role of Home Affairs as the foundation for citizen services in the country, the priority reforms we are delivering are reshaping the foundation of the South African State itself.

The quantum leap underway at Home Affairs is a catalytic moment where we are reshaping the organisation’s destiny.

In the process, we are deliberately working to also reshape all of the old assumptions about how government itself works – or doesn’t work.

We are here to prove that South Africa’s public sector organisations can not only be fixed, but that they can be radically reformed – within a single term of government – to become world-class institutions capable of propelling our country forward in the modern world.

We are here to prove that things can be done differently, that government does not have to be broken, slow, or stuck in the dark ages.

That it does not need to be out of touch with our young, modern, and digitally connected population.

In short, we are here to prove that even the most broken department in government can be fixed, quickly, so that we can restore the hope that South Africa as a whole can be fixed.

My fellow South Africans,

In the last six months, Home Affairs has more than tripled access to Smart ID replacement services.

No fewer than 515 bank branches now offer biometrically-based digital services where any South African can walk in without an appointment and apply for a replacement Smart ID in just five minutes.

Over 822 500 people have already used this new service.

By the end of 2026, it will be available at over one thousand service points – compared to just 214 locations that offered Smart ID replacements before the formation of the GNU.

This is a near-five-fold expansion in access and inclusion in just nine months.

Passport applications and first-time Smart ID applications will shortly also become available at these bank branches.

And, for the first time ever, South Africans will have the option of using secure courier delivery to bring their ID or Passport to their own doorstep – embodying the vision of Home Affairs @ home.

As a result of the rapid expansion in access to Smart ID services, we are now also in a position to announce the roadmap for phasing out the Green ID book.

In his address to the nation in June, the President indicated that Home Affairs was working on a solution to ensure that every South African is finally able to replace the fraud-prone Green ID book with the vastly more secure Smart ID card.

Independent research has found that the Green ID book is one of the most defrauded documents on the entire African continent.

Because it is paper-based and contains a manual photograph that can easily be replaced or manipulated, this document sits at the core of the scourge of identity theft in our country.

It is also a critical pull factor for illegal immigrants seeking to obtain fraudulent papers.

The continued use of the Green ID Book is irreconcilable with the functioning of a modern society.

Therefore, I am today announcing that the Department of Home Affairs will cease production of the Green ID Book by 31 March 2027.

On this date, the machines that produce this booklet will be permanently shut down and decommissioned.

Importantly, prior to 31 March 2027, the Department will enable the remaining cohort of naturalised citizens and permanent residents, as well as South African citizens abroad, to also obtain Smart IDs.

By including these groups that have historically been excluded, we will ensure that – for the first time ever – every single eligible person is finally able to obtain a secure Smart ID card.

Following the end of Green ID book production in March next year, the 14.7 million South African citizens and permanent residents who still hold only a Green ID book will have a further 12 months to make the switch to the Smart
ID.

First-time applicants, as well as applicants over 60 years of age, will remain exempt from paying the application fee for their Smart ID.

Consequently, on 31 March 2028, the Green ID book will officially cease to be recognised as a valid form of identification in terms of section 25(1)(b) of the Identification Act.

Over the past six months, we have already seen a dramatic increase in replacement rates thanks to our digital partnership.

As a result, the number of people whose only form of identification is a Green ID book has already fallen from 16 million to 14.7 million today.

We must now accelerate this progress to finally eliminate this source of fuel for identity theft and illegal immigration.

That is why we will be rolling out a major nationwide communication campaign to ensure that everyone is empowered with the information they need to make the switch.

I am calling on all South Africans who still have only a Green ID book to help combat abuses such as identity theft, financial fraud and illegal immigration by visiting their nearest participating branch immediately to switch to the Smart ID.

Thanks to our digital reforms, it now takes as little as five minutes to make the switch at your local bank branch, and you don’t need any prior booking or paperwork for this new service.

These are five minutes well spent to help secure our country.

We are also accelerating the expansion of the ETA to become the only platform to process all visa, permit, and immigration-related matters.

Just a few weeks after its launch, the ETA is now live for short-stay visa applications from 53 countries, with more being added every week.

This revolutionary new platform uses advanced biometrics, document verification and machine learning to secure the visa application, adjudication and communication process from beginning to end.

In early 2027, we will add additional visa categories, including study visas and work visas, into the ETA to eliminate the scope for human interference, fraud, or delays in South Africa’s visa processing system.

The ETA will be progressively rolled out beyond the current four international airports to cover all ports of entry, ensuring that no one can legally enter South Africa without providing the biometrics and other AI-verified credentials we require to enforce immigration law.
At the same time, this platform is already driving a revolution in tourism, as visa processes that used to take weeks have been cut to just 24 hours.

In the process, it is repositioning Home Affairs as a powerful economic enabler and driver of growth and job creation.

Where legitimate travellers from enormous source markets like China and India previously had to travel to only one or two physical locations to fill in a form, leave behind their passport, and wait weeks just to receive an outcome, an approved ETA is now issued within 24 hours and stored directly in a smartphone wallet.

This means more legitimate tourists, more money spent in South Africa, and more jobs created for South Africans.

We are also making rapid progress on building South Africa’s world-class new Digital Identity system.

The department is currently processing the public comments received on the draft Digital ID regulations, ahead of finalising the rules that will govern this system.

We have heard, in the public comments on the draft Digital ID regulations, a clear and legitimate question: will this system watch me?

And will government be responsible with this power?

My answer is that you should not have to take my word for it.

And, under the system we are building, you will not have to.
The final regulations will impose hard limits on what your data may be used for.

Use of the system will be voluntary.

The physical Smart ID card will remain available for anyone who chooses to use it.

Effectively, we are moving from a situation where we currently have two versions of valid ID – in the form of the insecure Green ID book and the Smart ID card – to two new versions, in the form of the secure Smart ID card and smartphone-based Digital ID.

Just like millions of South Africans today carry a digital banking card on their smartphone alongside the physical one in their wallet, so too will Digital ID and the Smart ID card complement each other.

And, just like with digital payments, Digital ID will be secured through the same biometric verification that we all already use to unlock our smartphones or confirm mobile payments.

Importantly, through Digital ID, you will be able to see, for yourself, every time your data is touched.

Surveillance is the state watching the citizen.

What we are building is the opposite: the citizen watching the state and other users of their data.

And because of the cutting-edge technology we are putting in place, we can go a step further.
Through the power of Digital ID, we will move towards ending the era of submitting an application at all.

Imagine never again needing to even remember that your passport is expiring.

Six months before it does, Home Affairs contacts you – through your Digital ID, and only if you have chosen to be contacted – with your renewal application already prepared and ready for submission.

You review it, verify it with your face, pay, and your new passport is delivered to your door.

No queue. No form. Not even an application.

And no new information about you – just one fact we have always held, the expiry date of a document we ourselves issued, put to work in your service through the latest agentic technology.

Most importantly, this is not some far-fetched promise.

It is no longer hypothetical.

It is reality.

It is my privilege to announce that Home Affairs has already built the first working prototype of the South African Digital ID.

And just to illustrate how powerful and secure this new system is, I will now do a live demonstration.
But this is not a slide deck or a dummy.

What you are about to see is not only a real, working Digital Identity credential that has been formally issued through the population register and bound to the chip on the smartphone in my hand.

This is my own, real Digital ID credential.

To underscore our commitment to this ground-breaking new system, the Minister of Home Affairs is the very first South African citizen who has a working Digital ID, using my real personal information.

On the screen right now, I present to you, South Africa’s first-ever official Digital Identity.

This represents nothing less than a quantum leap into the future for our country.

This is Home Affairs @ home – radical reform delivered at pace and scale.

How, you may ask, are we doing all this?

Firstly, through collaboration in the national interest.

In particular, our partnership with the South African Revenue Service, led by Commissioner Johnstone Makhubu and his team of capable and patriotic South Africans, is a shining example of how we can achieve so much more by working together.

With firm foundations now in place, Home Affairs looks forward to maximising the impact of our reforms to also support SARS in its critical mission.
SARS was there for us when we needed them the most, and now we are ready to return the favour by making this partnership a two-way street where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

But while digital transformation and partnership anchors our vision, the most important ingredient is actually not technological capacity.

It is leadership and culture change.

Every day, we are working together to build a new culture that mercilessly punishes delinquency, while rewarding progress, innovation and urgency.

That includes the 144 dismissals, 73 arrests and 10 convictions we have already secured since July 2024 across Home Affairs and the BMA.

But, most importantly, it also includes our investment in building #TeamHomeAffairs as an organisation where officials no longer come to work just to get through the day, but where every team member understands that our work is building a better country.

Even with all that we are already delivering, there are still a full two-and-a-half years left of this term in office.

We intend to use every second of that time to drive our reforms even further.

Thanks to the incredible progress we are making in our partnership with the banking sector, we now intend to take the system beyond just Smart IDs and Passports.

Over the rest of this term, we will work to automate the application process for all physical documents – including birth, marriage and death certificates – in order to make all physical Home Affairs documents available at over one thousand bank branches across the length and breadth of South Africa.

In the new year, we will also turn our attention to automating the birth, marriage and death registration process.

Working with both public and private healthcare providers, we will use the same biometric technology and collaborative approach that delivered the banking partnership to enable every parent to securely register their child’s birth without filling in a form or standing in a queue.

Home Affairs and Government Printing Works are also collaborating to introduce South Africa’s first-ever biometrically-secured ePassport.

As part of our preparation to roll out automated Passport applications to hundreds of bank branches, we have already implemented significant technology upgrades which biometrically verify the photo that ends up in your Passport.

Once we have fully automated the process to eliminate any scope for human manipulation or fraud, we will take a proposal to Cabinet for a new ePassport, which will introduce a secure chip containing the traveller’s biometrics and rendering the new South African Passport readable by electronic gates at airports around the world.

Once both the digital systems and hardware upgrades are in place to eliminate Passport application fraud, we will embark on negotiations with the aim of obtaining visa-free access to more countries around the world for South Africans who use the new, secure ePassport.

Once the ETA is fully rolled out, the BMA will also pursue the introduction of automated gates and gantries at all ports of entry.

This will eliminate reliance on manual passport stamping, in favour of electronic gates that will only open once the biometrics of the arriving foreign traveller is matched to the biometrics contained on their ETA.

The significance of this next-phase reform for border security can be summarised in a simple sentence: you cannot bribe a computer.

At the same time, we are driving forward the R12.5 billion public-private partnership to demolish and reconstruct our country’s six busiest land ports-ofentry as no-stop border posts.

By the end of this administration, we want at least one port fully completed and operational, with construction progressing at all the others.

But there is one final reform I am announcing today that is both the culmination of, and the capstone to, all of the other work we are doing.

Under the old centralised and manual model, under-resourced Home Affairs offices were so overwhelmed by the volume of routine applications for IDs and Passports that it was impossible to deal with the biggest crisis of all: the failure to document every South African citizen.

Thanks to Home Affairs @ home, that is now changing.

As citizens increasingly gain access to digital self-service channels at their local bank branch and through Digital ID, the volume of people visiting traditional offices for basic, routine transactions will decline.

We have already started to see queues getting shorter at our offices as hundreds of bank branches have come online.

But this presents an opportunity that goes beyond just the convenience of shorter queues for citizens, and relief for our overburdened officials.

By getting routine cases like ID and Passport renewals out of our queues, we are freeing up our officials to focus on the millions of South Africans who desperately need our help.

I am referring specifically to the millions of citizens who – 32 years into democracy – remain undocumented in their own country.

Today I can announce that, for our final priority reform, we are beginning preparations for a historic campaign during the 2028/29 financial year to document every single undocumented South African citizen.

This will include a comprehensive regulatory review of all late birth registration and documentation requirements and processes to build a fit-for-purpose new system that does not exclude any South African citizen from formal recognition in the country of their birth.

With the capacity freed up by our digital reforms, Home Affairs will make use of mobile biometric technology to systematically document every last citizen.

We will get all available capacity out of our offices and physically visit every community across the length and breadth of the country.

Our goal is to ensure that, by the end of this administration in 2029, every last South African citizen is formally documented for the first time in the history of our country.

In doing so, the GNU is working towards delivering on one of the most fundamental promises of our constitutional project.

It is for this reason that we have gathered today at Constitution Hill to mark this moment.

By becoming the first government to ever empower all citizens with a formal recognition of their identity, we will practically restore the dignity of the millions of mostly black, rural and underserved citizens who have remained excluded from this aspect of our democratic transition for over three decades.

This will not only unlock social and economic opportunities for millions of marginalised South Africans.

As the capstone achievement of our reform drive, it will also serve as the embodiment of our commitment to deliver dignity for all.

My fellow South Africans,

Remember those boxes of paper submissions I inherited on day one in the job?

It has now been nearly 18 months since I last signed any submission in paper format, as we have long since replaced paperwork with digital processes.

A backlog of over 306 000 paper visa applications is being replaced by the ETA.

Long travel times, queues, paperwork and centralisation at just 329 locations is being replaced by over a thousand decentralised, digital self-service options.

The fraud-prone Green ID book is being replaced by a modern and secure Digital Identity system.

Corruption is not only being fought; it is being replaced by automation.
Travel restrictions are being replaced by a biometric ePassport and negotiations for more visa-free access.

Land ports of entry are being replaced by modern no-stop infrastructure and electronic gates.

And, most importantly, for millions of undocumented citizens, decades of exclusion are being replaced by a systematic campaign of inclusion, recognition, and the delivery of dignity.

By the time we are done with this work two-and-a-half years from now, we will not only leave behind a Home Affairs that is unrecognisably better than the one we inherited.

Not only will we leave behind a country where every citizen enjoys the dignity of being documented, and the access of digitally transformed service delivery.

We will also leave behind a new vision for the future.

This is a future where South Africa rediscovers our self-belief.

Where we rekindle the hope that even our most daunting problems can be solved – but only when we choose leadership and vision that embraces radical reform, urgency, public-private partnership, and innovation.

Finally, we need to recognise that the type of modernisation we are delivering at Home Affairs is required across the whole of our State and society.

Wholesale digital transformation is no longer optional for any country – it is now a prerequisite for functioning in the modern world, in the same category as water, food and electricity.
In this new age, South Africa simply can no longer afford governments that employ people to physically push trolleys of papers around buildings and that use cardboard boxes to ferry piles of paper up-and-down the country – as I found at Home Affairs.

Institutions that are so wildly out of touch with the digital age are not only anachronistic – they are dangerous.

Their failure to reform, digitalise and modernise risks our country being left behind by a world we will no longer have the capacity to understand.

Home Affairs @ home is therefore about much more than a set of individual projects or technologies.

It is a comprehensive, systematic and interlocking reform programme that is delivering an entirely new, cutting-edge operating system for government, fitfor-purpose in the modern world.

For this reason, the Home Affairs Quantum Leap is of fundamental importance to the future of each and every South African family.

It is also a template for what that future can look like.

A future where practical problems are solved through urgency, through systems thinking rather than ambulance chasing, through relentlessly driving clear priorities, through embracing partnership and modernisation, through capital-light execution, and through transforming organisational culture.

I call on every partner in this room, and on every citizen who wants our country to compete and thrive in the age of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence, to work with us over the coming months and years.

Now is the time to leverage the radical reform of Home Affairs into a quantum leap forward for all of South Africa, replacing public service delivery as-weknow-it with a new vision for government as modern, technologically-enabled, and relentlessly focused on delivering dignity for all.

Thank you.

ISSUED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HOME AFFAIRS