Pretoria - At least 90% of the 260 million civil records at Home Affairs are still kept in paper-based forms, making them vulnerable to loss.
Minister Malusi Gigaba said piles of information stored in the department’s old archive system in Pretoria dated back to 1928.
Gigaba was speaking to the media at the launch of a project on the digitalisation of civil records on Wednesday at ISIbalo House, the headquarters of Statistics South Africa (StatsSA).
Earlier in the day, Gigaba walked about at the department’s office near the corner of Bosman and Jeff Masemola streets, where mountains of files had been stored in rows of shelves. He said there were at least 110 million birth certificates at the civil record storage centre, and the rest were death and marriage certificates.
Gigaba was accompanied by the Statistician-General of South Africa, Dr Pali Lehohla. The digitalisation project was a partnership between the department and StatsSA, where a data processing centre was located for scanning of documents into electronic forms.
Gigaba said the project signified a transition from the old systems of record-keeping to a modern, efficient and secure storage method.
He said the department had devised plans to do away with old archiving system because it was vulnerable to loss.
The minister said the department had a budget of R10 million to convert 11.6 million documents into an electronic format within two years.
However, he said the department would have to lobby for more funding in order to process additional documents. They would not be discarded after they had been scanned, but would be kept for heritage purposes, Gigaba said.
“For heritage and legacies, it would be good to keep those records to be able to see the original marriage certificates of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu,” Gigaba said.
However, he said the place for housing the documents was scarce and expensive.
Lehohla said the process for the digitalisation of records started in 2001 in line with the government’s modernisation project.
The vision of the project was that people could be able to access the information at the click of the button, Lehohla said.
He hailed the partnership between the two State institutions to implement the technology.
Gigaba said the process was in full swing to transfer information from stacks of documents into a digital format.
He said digitalisation was one of the priorities of the President Jacob Zuma administration done in line with the modernisation programme.
It was part of the government agenda to move away from the paper-based system, he said.
“In years to come we will all admit that the commencement of this project was a revolution in the public service.”
The department keeps the records for more than 100 years in line with the Archive Act.
One of the benefits of the new system will be to help people construct family trees.
Gigaba said: “It will enable you at the click of a button to get the document you want, but it would also enable us to know your full story (about) your father, your mother, your father’s mother, your mother’s grandfather, your siblings and all.”