Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor will, Thursday 17 April 2014, open a new home affairs office in Mossel Bay, Western Cape, to improve services by bringing facilities closer to people.

Providing new offices and refurbishing existing ones is for improving the office environment better to meet needs of citizens and staff members. It is also part of government’s drive to improve quality of services particularly for people in remote and rural parts of the country. This will in the long run ensure home affairs offices are within easy reach of communities, are less congested and ran by officials who are motivated and more responsive to the needs of the people.

These new offices, like those opened recently in Barkley West (Northern Cape) and Bredasdorp (Western Cape), help to reduce travelling time for citizens requiring home affairs services, including senior citizens and people living with disabilities.

In the 2012/13 financial year, 19 offices were refurbished as part of the programme to improve the frontline environment for the public and officials. In total, 136 offices, 58 in rural and 78 in urban areas, were refurbished since the launch of the department’s Look and Feel project. There are 404 home affairs offices around the country. Where there are no offices as yet, people in remote areas are serviced through 115 mobile offices.

The goal is also to reach isolated and vulnerable communities and individuals who’ve not yet been registered in the National Population Register or who do not have IDs and may thus be unable to access social services, including farm workers and their children.

As with service points across the country, the Mossel Bay office will empower individuals by providing them with IDs and other enabling documents. Importantly, the office is opening ahead of the 7 May general elections and will therefore assist voters in need of documents for this purpose. The priority is also to ensure voters have necessary documents prior to the elections.

The opening of a new office in Mossel Bay is timely coming at a time when the department is entrenching modern technology as part of the drive to speed up service delivery, combat fraud and lower the cost for the state and business.

Home affairs is moving towards sufficient, accessible, efficient offices to meet the needs of people across the country, with all offices using live capture of biometric data – photographs, fingerprints and signatures – in a secure, digital, paperless environment.

THE MEDIA IS INVITED AS FOLLOWS:

DATE:            Thursday, 17 April 2014

TIME:             09H00

Venue:           Thusong Service Centre, 108 Adriaans Street, KwaNonqaba, Mossel Bay

RSVP:            Thabo Mokgola (071 712 9710), by Wednesday 16 April 2014, midday

For more information, please contact: Ronnie Mamoepa 082 990 4853; Lunga Ngqengelele 082 566 0446; David Hlabane 071 527 9463.

Issued by the Department of Home Affairs