One South African Home Affairs office had no electricity for 3 years

The Home Affairs office in Abaqulusi, Vryheid, KwaZulu-Natal, has been operating without electricity for more than three years.

This startling detail was revealed by Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber in a written parliamentary reply to EFF MP Lencel Komane.

According to Schreiber, the electricity was cut off by the local municipality, not due to debts owed by the Department of Home Affairs (DHA), but because of a dispute involving another government department.

“The municipality decided to cut off the electricity in Vryheid office due to the arrears owed to it by the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure (DPWI) for the eMondlo township office, which falls under the same municipality,” Schreiber explained.

“The Vryheid office has no arrears, but the municipality used it to compel the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) to pay a bill for eMondlo, which was meant to be paid by DPWI.”

In the interim, DHA has been using a generator to keep the office operational while discussions between the municipality, DPWI, and DHA continue.

However, Komane described this as unreliable and said the situation has had a “severe impact on service delivery to the local community.”

Since the early days of load shedding in 2008, power cuts have consistently disrupted the DHA’s IT systems, which rely on a stable electricity supply to operate.

However, another factor in this has been its IT service provider.

In January 2024, a nationwide outage, caused by a failure in SITA’s (State Information Technology Agency) mainframe, brought all Home Affairs services to a standstill, cutting off access to the National Population Register.

Just a year later, in February 2025, another major technical fault further exposed the fragility of DHA’s digital backbone.

When the system is down, citizens can’t apply for IDs, passports, or birth certificates. Delays impact travel, job applications, and grant access.

Other departments are also feeling the strain of unreliable systems. Parliament’s Justice and Constitutional Development Committee chairperson, Xola Nqola, has spoken out about how SITA’s failures are hindering court operations and the wider Integrated Justice System.

Behind the scenes, SITA’s own challenges, vacant posts, slow procurement, and unstable leadership have compounded the problem.

In response, the DHA is pushing for sweeping reforms. Schreiber has said that he has made system reliability a top priority, famously declaring in 2024 that “The System is Offline” should become a “swear word.”

The department now plans to cut ties with SITA entirely, aiming to work with private IT providers who can, according to the department, offer more dependable, cost-effective solutions.

This strategy is echoed by Communications Minister Solly Malatsi, who supports allowing departments to appoint their own IT vendors, citing SITA’s track record of poor governance and inefficiency.

SITA, for its part, says it is trying to improve. It is rolling out a five-year, R400 million investment to rebuild its core network and boost uptime.

Its data centres are being upgraded to Tier III standards, which can better handle power disruptions. The agency also offered DHA a free digital ID solution, though this has yet to be taken up.

Still, the February 2025 outage shows how far things still have to go. During recent public hearings on the Marriage Bill, Parliament’s committee conducted surprise visits to DHA offices and repeatedly heard one complaint: the system is always offline.

Chairperson of the Home Affairs Committee Mosa Chabane expressed frustration that legislation meant to exempt security cluster departments from SITA’s platforms, “which have proved to be unreliable,” has stalled.

He said that the “inability to bring this legislation to fruition is unacceptable and will exacerbate an already dire situation, which contributes to the erosion of trust between the department and the broader South African community who use the services of the DHA.”

While system and infrastructure issues continue to plague DHA offices across the country, the department has made some progress; most notably, clearing a backlog of over 247,000 identity document applications that had built up since November 2023.