We take this opportunity to welcome all members of the media present with us here in Cape Town and Pretoria to the Home Affairs weekly media briefing. A special welcome is extended to our guests.
As you all are aware, the Home Affairs department has over the past few months been involved in efforts aimed at rolling out the Smart ID cards to the people of our country. Since the launch of the smart ID card, on Nelson Mandela Day 18 July 2013, we have extended the roll-out of the cards to a few sectors of our society.
Our briefing today takes place against the background of the declaration of 3 December as the official National Day of Persons with Disabilities and the end of the National Disability Rights Awareness Month which called on all of us to reflect on the role we have played over the past year in creating a better life for persons with disabilities as equal citizens.
Accordingly and in this context, we have convened this briefing with this representative group of people with disabilities to brief you about steps the department of Home Affairs has undertaken with regard to the extension of the roll-out of the Smart ID card to this sector and as part of efforts to create awareness of the incidence of citizens living with various forms of disabilities.
As part of our efforts to ensure quality and responsive service delivery to all sectors of our society, the department has ensured as far as possible that our online application process is accommodating of persons with disability. In designing the smart card we have together with the department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities ensured that the new Smart ID Card has Braille features. This will enable visually impaired people to easily differentiate the smart card from other similar cards in their possession. In this context, the roll-out of the Smart ID card must be viewed within the context of the consolidation of the restoration of national identity, citizenship and dignity which were denied to the majority of our citizens by successive racist regimes.
Today we are proud to hand over the Smart ID card to a representative group of people living with disabilities. They join the first group of people who are among the first recipients of the Smart ID cards
Since the public launch of the roll-out of the smart ID cards on 18 July –Nelson Mandela, the department has since extended the roll-out to more sectors of our people including among others a representative group of senior citizens, members of the Home Affairs portfolio committee, cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, the Chairperson and Deputy Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, former Ministers of Home Affairs, Buthelezi and Mapisa-Nqakula.
Our team is currently working round the clock to upgrade infrastructure at various offices to enable them to process smart card applications. We are happy to announce that in addition to the original 3 offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town, on the 2nd December the following offices have come on line – Eastern Cape - Port Elizabeth, Umtata and King William’s town, Free State – Bloemfontein and Wynberg in the Western Cape.
We wish to recall the following:
- In addition our Minister Naledi Pandor has announced the extension of waiver of fees of R140-00 to 16 year-olds and pensioners who are 60 years and above.
- The roll-out of the smart ID card will take a few years so the public is called upon to exercise patience.
- Citizens should await invitations to come to Home Affairs offices to apply for the smart ID card.
- Applicants will be invited in accordance with their months of birth.
- The green-bar coded ID remains a legal form of identity until a formal declaration is made in this regard and once all citizens on the NPR are issued ID cards.
- When applying for the Smart ID citizens will be expected to bring along their old green-bar coded IDs.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the media, it is thus my singular honour to preside over the process of the handover of the Smart ID cards to our special guests today, on behalf of the department of home Affairs.
NAMES:
Ms. Rhulani Baloyi
Mr. Babsy Mlangeni
Mr. Jace Nair
Adv. Bokankatla Malatji
Ms. Cathy Donaldson
Mr. Asaph Dikgale
Mr. Siva Moodley
Transcript Copy; Home Affairs Deputy Minister Fatima Chohan; Statement and Question & Answer; 05 December 2013; Cape Town
Question: Deputy Minister, how many such cards are going to be manufactured and issued by the Department to this particular community? As far as I can recall, the Department was saying or rather the Minister was saying that the rollout of the smart card was going to take seven years, is that still in order? I see that in the rollout of your regional offices you have the Western Cape, Gauteng and the Free State, when is it going to happen in other provinces like the Eastern Cape, KZN and the Northern Cape?
Question: My question is around the issue of the Braille features, can you perhaps elaborate what exactly this Braille features constitute? I can I understand maybe they are looking at easy identification of the blind people but what else? Are there such things as security features perhaps that are uniquely for the disabled people? Also, on the extension of the waiver for 16 year olds and pensioners of 60 years and above…is there such kind of special fees for people with disabilities and if not why?
Answer: Let me begin by responding to the question on how many cards will be distributed to the sector in particular. I do not have any specific figures at this point, as you know the first phase of the rollout is really to stress-test our systems in those offices where we are online…so we have targeted a 100 000 cards in this first phase and as our offices come online we will try and identify various sectors, the aged, the disabled, etcetera, in order to stress-test our systems at the various offices but in the first phase we are looking at a 100 000 smart cards. The following provinces are now online: Bloemfontein in the Free State, in the Eastern Cape we have three offices: Port Elizabeth, Umtata and King Williamstown. We also have the Gauteng office which is Harrison Street…we also have the Byron Place in Pretoria. In the Western Cape we also have two…the one in Barrack Street and the other one now that has just come online on the second of December in Wynberg. So, those are the ones that are currently online. We are hoping that by the end of December we will have 26 offices around the country online that are able to proceed with the processing of the smart cards.
The Braille features…if you were to look at the smart card you will see in kind of gold, silver at the bottom it says ID and those are obviously for people who are not visually impaired however, directly above that you will see that there are these dots… and these dots, for those of us who are illiterate in Braille, actually stand for ID. So, they are quite prominently punched out on the card on the polycarbonate and if you were to touch it, you would immediately feel the Braille on your fingertips…and this is what we are referring to when we say that we have Braille features so that if you put this card into your wallet with your other polycarbonate cards such as your credit cards and so on, which are not so easily identifiable in terms of what card they are you can easily get confused as to which card are you pulling out of your wallet if you are visually impaired… and this feature then helps to identify the correct card…and that in itself is a security feature as some of our guests have alluded because if you are visually impaired and you are meant to present your ID card to somebody for identification for identification purposes and you give them the wrong card that makes you prone to all kinds of fraud particularly if the card that you have given is a credit card. In addition to that security feature there are very many others, not least of those is the digitally processed and stored fingerprints. For those people who are disabled in the sense that they do not have hands of fingerprints…fingers as such…there is a there is a process whereby they are able to have a unique pin code that they are able to use instead of the fingerprints. All of these features are uniform on everybody’s ID card…it is not necessarily unique to people with disabilities.
As to fee waivers…the reason why the fee is being waived for 16 year olds…as I said in the statement it is not all 16 year olds…it is those who have applied for IDs for the first time. This is the usual practice…that your first ID is free. The only concession so far has been for pensioners…pensioners have been exempted and we announced that in October. So far we have not exempted persons with disabilities for various reasons and part of the reason is that not all disabled people are necessarily on disability grants. Many of our disabled citizens are in jobs and employed and as such we have not as yet been able to negotiate a fee waiver from Treasury for any other sector apart from the two that I have mentioned. We have been in consultations with Treasury where our position was that we should be able to extend the extensions beyond the two categories but this is where these negotiations have ended…it is only these sectors that are exempted at this stage.
Question: When will this first phase be completed? And this first 100 000 cards that you are targeting, do you have a percentage that will go to people with disabilities, the elderly…are you dividing it like that?
Question: Do other countries have Braille features like we are going to have now? If so, which are those if you know?
Answer: We have not specifically said that we will have a certain percentage of cards issued to different sectors…the reason is that because we are stress-testing our systems as they come online, each office will need to be tested through the same processes. The first three offices are already at an advanced stage of stress-testing…the new offices that have come online from 02 December will start ratcheting up their stress tests in the same way as the first three offices together with the in-house training that the staff will need to go through. It becomes very difficult, given the distribution of our offices, to say that we must have 20 percent for the aged and 30 percent for young people…Part of the stress-test is to enable to modifier wherever necessary to ensure that we are able to meet all kinds of circumstances and that our operations flow smoothly as the numbers start increasing
I am not aware of any country that has Braille features…what did happen with our own processes is that we worked very closely with the disabled community through the Department of Women, Children and People with Disabilities in coming up with the design and there were various options that we had to choose from…we were able to choose a design that we thought was fully functional and allowed easy access and independence…
Question: (Inaudible)
We are hoping that by the end of this year we will have 26 offices online and in the next quarter we will ratchet that up to just under a hundred and by the end of 2014 we hope to have more than half of our offices all with their infrastructure complete and online…By that point we hope to be in a position where the stress-test would be over and then rollout further infrastructure… depending on the offices we will not need to stress-test as we are doing with other offices.
ENDS