South Africa’s newly appointed Home Affairs Minister, Dr. Leon Schreiber, has announced plans to upgrade the security features of Smart ID cards and passports.
The announcement was made during the Department of Home Affairs’ 2024/2025 budget vote speech.
Schreiber “Both the passport and Smart ID card will be refreshed and updated to enhance the security features of these documents, with the aim of building trust by more countries and organisations worldwide,”.
The minister did not specify a date for the updates but mentioned they would occur “during the current administration,” which is expected to serve until the next general elections in 2029.
The South African passport has faced significant issues with fraud, impacting travellers who are now required to obtain visas for countries like the United Kingdom.
It would be recalled that the former Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi highlighted the widespread impact of passport fraud on South Africans and emphasized the department’s zero-tolerance policy towards corruption.
Motsoaledi’s comments followed the sentencing of a Pakistani national for bribing twelve Home Affairs officials to produce fraudulent passports. These syndicates typically use the identification information of South Africans who are unlikely to travel abroad, swapping their photos with those of foreign nationals.
In response to such fraud, low-cost airline Ryanair controversially introduced an Afrikaans-only questionnaire for South Africans before boarding flights in 2022, which was later scrapped after backlash.
Additionally, Schreiber announced progress in issuing Smart ID cards to naturalized citizens, with 280 cards already issued and another 697 in progress.
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This development as Smart ID cards have primarily been restricted to locally-born citizens since their launch in 2013. The Democratic Alliance has long advocated for this change, arguing that restricting Smart ID cards to locally-born citizens infringe on the rights of naturalized citizens.
Home Affairs began piloting the issuance of Smart ID cards to naturalized citizens in December 2023.
