Fewer than 10 000 people made their way to Home Affairs offices to collect their IDs over the voter registration weekend.
This was far less than the more than 500 000 IDs sitting in the offices waiting to be collected.
This was revealed by the department when it briefed the home affairs portfolio committee along with the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) on the voter registration on November 18 and 19.
Deputy Minister Njabulo Nzuza said they had taken a decision to open their offices to enable those in need of IDs to participate in voter registration.
“Over the weekend we had 20 350 people who came in to visit our offices,” Nzuza said.
He said there were about 9 312 clients who collected their smart ID cards and 8 832 applied for smart IDs.
There were 842 people who collected their green bar-coded books and 993 clients were issued with temporary identity certificates.
Nzuza said their offices in Gauteng had experienced glitches after the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) went ahead with the planned system upgrade despite being asked not to do so.
“Someone decided to continue within SITA, which affected us for about three and half hours.
“We lost substantial hours due to that issue that we inherited from SITA,” he added.
The department’s Thomas Sigama told the committee that as of October 30, there were 559 799 smart IDs at their office.
Of those IDs, 135 683 were for first-time applications, while 424 116 were for those who came to replace their IDs.
“Our focus was to reduce the 135 683 that are lying in our offices that applied for the first time,” said Sigama.
He said 295 offices had opened on Saturday to assist clients and 284 opened on Sunday.
About 81 mobile units were in operation on Saturday and 77 the following day.
IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya said the electoral body had a good voter registration weekend.
“It was good because we had operationally managed to have arrangements put in place. Things worked as we planned. The staff worked well,” Moepya said.
He also said a total of 2.9 million registrations were recorded, with 568 374 being new registrations.
Moepya said there were 445 000 registrations by people aged between 16 and 29, representing 73% of new registrations.
Gauteng registered the highest number of people.
Their share was 21%, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 19.3% and Eastern Cape with 17%.
Cape Times