A Parliamentary Committee has lashed out at the Department of Home Affairs for another round of “downtime” which has severely impacted services across the country.
Home Affairs said on Friday that it was experiencing a system downtime due to a power supply outage at the State Information Technology Agency, which had affected all offices across the country.
The Department said the outage is affecting all services related to Births, Marriages, Deaths, Smart ID and Passports.
Department spokesperson, Thabo Mokgola, said SITA and Home Affairs technicians are investigating and the public will be informed when all services will be restored.
But, the Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs, Hlomani Chauke, said it was “completely unacceptable that people could spend the whole day at home affairs offices without receiving services”.
He said the Committee has, over time, raised concerns over the reliability of service that the State Information Technology Agency offers to the department and has been receiving assurances that interventions are being implemented to remedy the trend of constant disruptions and downtime.
“Even more concerning to the committee is the fact that the department failed to properly communicate with those affected. The Committee is of the view that the least the department could have done was to disseminate information earlier to enable people to make informed decisions,” Chauke said.
“The majority of our people take a day off work to access the services of the department and this means that today was a wasted day and they would have to take another day off. Also, poor people will be forced to spend more money from already overextended budgets to get to home affairs offices,” Chauke added.
