Durban - After December next year, parents whose children are still without birth certificates 30 days after their birth will have to go through an “agonising” screening process to establish the veracity of their babies’ identities before being issued with the documents.
This was the word from Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba, who said the department would set up committees which would, as of January 2016, conduct identity screening processes at its offices around the country for those who had failed to meet the deadline.
The department had established a “stiff” and “painful” process to fight the corruption that had rocked it, leading to stolen social grants and tainting the country’s image.
Gigaba said in Durban on Tuesday that while early birth registration would be convenient for parents and children, it would also help the country fight crime. He was in the city to assess the state of online “instant” birth registration at Addington Hospital and visited a maternity ward to hand over birth certificates to mothers of newborns.
In 2005 the department introduced offices in a number of public hospitals to help parents register their children soon after birth. The process, said to take less than 10 minutes to complete, is now available at 389 hospitals across the country, but Gigaba had approached the Department of Health to help expand it to all health institutions, including private facilities.
“Late registration creates all sorts of problems, including the opportunity for non-South Africans to obtain fraudulent proof of birth so they can be fraudulently registered as South Africans,” he said.
The department had been forced to conduct a “very expensive” national population audit and discovered that there were many foreigners illegally registered as South Africans.
He made an example of Briton Samantha Lewthwaite, also known as the “White Widow”, who was linked to the terrorist attack at the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, as an example of the danger when foreigners fraudulently obtained South African documents.
“She (Lewthwaite) travelled through South Africa using a South African passport.
“She might have committed these crimes in Kenya, but, think of it, she could have committed the same crimes in South Africa,” said Gigaba.
Health MEC Sibongiseni Dhlomo said there were 35 provincial hospitals that had internal birth certificate registration programmes. “We wish that in future, all mothers could walk out of hospital with birth certificates,” he said.
The Mercury