People queue outside an Internal Affairs office on Barrack Street in Cape Town.
- The Department of the Interior launched a new appointment booking system last year.
- But citizens of the Western Cape have complained about poor communication and service delivery.
- It appears that the website may have been affected by glitches in the past as well.
Ten months after the Home Department launched a new online appointment booking system in selected offices across the country, South Africans have described “chaos” and poor service delivery at branches in the Western Cape.
The department launched its Branch Appointment Booking System (BABS) in May of last year.
Many people who spoke to News24 recently complained that the system discriminates against citizens who do not have access to computers, smartphones and the Internet. The main complaint is that whatever system is in place, it is not communicated to people in advance.
After witnessing around 100 people waiting in the sun and hearing numerous complaints, News24 was unable to find an official to explain what system was in place at the Barrack Street office in Cape Town on Friday, February 3.
Jill Francke arrived early one morning and waited in what she thought was the correct queue for an hour, before being told she was in the wrong queue. They forced her to stay at the end of another queue.
“There was no way of knowing which queue we were supposed to be in. [in]so only then do we find out that there are queues for IDs, passports and temporary IDs.”
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Francke said he had been queuing for five hours, describing the internal affairs department staff as “rude, unhelpful and unfriendly”.
Kaylin Snyman complained of standing in line for nearly eight hours to apply for a new ID, while accompanied by her diabetic mother. Her mother, Veronica Pietersen, said she paid R10 to rent a chair for four hours to sit on.
Eileen Dyson, 65, described how she spent four hours in line on a Tuesday without being helped. She waited in line once more for seven hours.
She said:
I am unemployed, but I always have to find R50 travel money to go to the city and back home.
A man waiting outside the Barrack Street office, Patrick van Niekerk, complained that no one had told them what steps to take.
“Other people came and were allowed in right away, but there’s no ticket system, so we don’t know what’s going on.”
Office officials were unable to provide News24 with much information on what the standard operating procedures were.
‘It’s not fair’
A manager indicated that they had “sent the van over to help with the queue”.
In fact, a van was parked outside the building, but the occupant was not helping anyone and refused to answer any of our questions.
Back at the office, another manager refused to explain what system was in place, but provided News24 with an A4 page captioned “Waging a war against long lines”, which explained the “Branch Appointment Booking System (BABS)”. .
Similar scenes were described by people queuing in Stellenbosch and Somerset West.
A Somerset West retiree, who preferred to remain anonymous, described the “terrible experience” of standing outside in the heat for six hours to collect a passport.
She said:
I can’t understand why I have to wait so long because all I had to do was pick up a passport.
“It is not fair to the people who have been waiting in line since 05:00. They go early for help but then others who have booked online are served within minutes.
“What about the thousands who can’t book online?
“And when there’s load shedding, everything is off, while you have to stand for two hours, and when load shedding is over, the computers have to reboot, which takes another hour.”
gremlins online
There also seems to be problems with the online reservation system.
A woman who identified herself as “Lisa from Cape Town” wrote to the minister on the People’s Assembly website in August last year about flaws in the Department of Home Affairs website:
“Your website is absolutely terrible! It has been ever since we were told to use the online reservation system. My friends, family, neighbors and random strangers and I struggle every day to get the website to load first and secondly, when you do, you log in and click Next, then the website shows a ‘Service Unavailable’ error, then you try again and the website doesn’t load.”
Department officials either declined to answer questions or were unavailable.
