PRETORIA, GAUTENG, TUESDAY 15 OCTOBER 2013

TRANSCRIPT COPY

Minister Naledi Pandor (Introduction): 

Good morning to all our colleagues in the media, thank you very much for being here with us today. We are opening three offices that we have totally renovated in order to be able to accept applications for the Smart ID Card. We had indicated that we would only be opened to the public once the offices were properly outfitted with the Live Capture System and servers that are connected to the national database. Now that we have done that with three offices, we are able to announce their opening today. It is this office, Byron Place in Pretoria, Harrison Street office in Johannesburg and simultaneously Barrack Street office in Cape Town, which is being opened with the DG (Mkuseli Apleni) present there. We, at the end of November, intend opening 26 more offices that we are currently renovating and putting servers in. We will have a total of 29 before the end of this year.

Question: Who can apply?

Answer: We are piloting the  system to ensure that we can deal with larger numbers and so we are starting with a pool of around a hundred thousand made up by first time applicants –16 year-olds who do not have IDs at the moment, senior citizens who are sixty years and over, we wish to focus on some of the leaders in the media who will be invited to enable them to communicate the message of this process with us, members of parliament, leaders in government, premiers, and of course the President and the Deputy President already have their Smart ID Cards. We believe that when we have gone through this pilot pool, we will be certain that we are absolutely system-ready for the population of South Africa.

Question: Minister, with the offices opened, are we now welcome to just pitch and apply for Smart ID Cards?

Answer: As I said, we are testing the pool so we are really trying to keep the numbers within the hundred thousand but of course if you come and apply we will get you logged onto the system. You may not receive your card immediately but now the public is able to come in.

Question: Minister, how has Home Affairs staff been trained to cope with the applications?

Answer: The training is ongoing and it will be as we develop the system. We are having training programmes in all the offices, we took staff out for a number of days and we have been training over weekends, we continue to offer training within the premises in the department using the live capture booths. This is an ongoing thing because not all our staff are fully technology-compliant in terms of computer literacy, we had to train word processing and just understanding how to access databases and so on.

Question: Minister, once all the offices are opened, how are you going to control the influx of the people?

Answer: We will be inviting per month of birth and we will announce that, I think early next year we will begin that public call per month of birth.