NATASHA MARRIAN: Schreiber buoyant as home affairs goes hi-tech

The department of home affairs is among the most citizen-facing ministries, with all South Africans having to deal with it at key points in their lives — from birth, death and marriage to passports and IDs.

It is also one historically plagued by corruption, inefficiency and neglect, and a poisoned chalice for any minister. But Leon Schreiber, a DA minister in the GNU, seems almost elated as he outlines his vision for the department to the FM. 

Schreiber is passionate about government reform. He and the DA have been at the forefront in the push for the professionalisation of the public service and an end to cadre deployment, the ANC practice of appointing party loyalists above people with expertise and experience.

This campaign, coupled with his five-year stint at Princeton University studying government reform in 28 mostly African and Asian countries, before his return to active politics, primed Schreiber for the job.

It was one incident shortly after his appointment, and the difficulties in resolving it, that showed him how vital it is to get to the root of a problem and not just treat the symptoms.

Last year 95 Libyans were discovered receiving military training in Mpumalanga. Aside from the risk to national security, they were terrorising surrounding communities, which experienced a marked rise in crime including rape and robbery. It was just another bizarre South African story, but for Schreiber it was the first of many fires he had to extinguish.

“You come into an environment where the house is on fire,” he says, “and you are being pulled in a hundred different directions. I can understand how someone, even with good intentions, could spend five years just putting out fires but not getting to the systemic cause of the fires.

“Where is it coming from, and why are systems so vulnerable that these things keep happening? Of course, you have to deal with challenges as they arise and I’ve had my fair share of those. But the most important part is you have to have absolute clarity about where you’re trying to go, and in your diagnosis of the underlying problem.”

In South Africa’s case, he says, the underlying problem — an affliction throughout the government — is failure to take digital transformation seriously. “It is one of the rare opportunities we have to leapfrog and address multiple problems at once.”

The Libyans had handwritten visa documents, “pieces of paper” pasted into their passports, filled out by an official. It was a recipe for mistakes, and for corruption. 

This incident, along with other similar ones, bolstered Schreiber’s push for the wholesale digitalisation of home affairs functions, including electronic travel authorisation (ETA) documents for foreigners entering South Africa. As a result of this drive, the department has dismissed scores of officials, “probably more than anyone else this year”, he says.

“So with the ETA, you are going to be able to apply seamlessly online. We’re using machine learning to do all the routine work in the background to check that your passport is authentic, that your selfie matches the biometrics on your passport.

“When you arrive at the immigration desk in South Africa, you look into a camera and you’ve got the visa in your smartphone wallet, and we just confirm that the face of the person who showed up is the same as the one who applied. In addition to that security element, there’s the enormous efficiency gain that goes with this.”

If the visa process is tiresome for tourists and visitors, the experience of home affairs can be absolutely torturous for South Africans, who have no other way of obtaining essential documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates and, crucially, IDs, without which it can be impossible to proceed with life.

The work done to bed down the ETA is now being expanded to these domestic functions. Schreiber is confident the old green ID book will be out of production by the end of the year. The familiar document has been open to manipulation and forgery; Smile ID, Africa’s leading verification agency, says the green ID book is 500% more vulnerable to corruption than the smart ID card.

Digitalisation has already been rolled out at the country’s borders. Hi-tech drones have been deployed and the ETA is set to be coupled with automated entry and exit. But with the Border Management Authority (BMA) still in its infancy, illegal immigration remains a key challenge and impossible to quantify. “The problem is that it’s not a population that can be measured. By definition, these people are undocumented.”

Schreiber says the space is fraught with deep problems involving departments across the government, including the police, but as the process to secure citizen and travel documents picks up speed, opportunities for those entering and staying in the country illegally will become more limited.

It is a journey, not a destination, he says. The BMA is working under immense strain and with few resources. “I really commend people there, who are working under extremely difficult circumstances. They are the most underfunded entity in the state.”

Schreiber has a clear five-year plan, which he is confident will revolutionise home affairs.

The danger, one outside his control, is that the GNU falls apart. If it does, all the positive work could be undone.