Mr Vusi Simelane’s life has come to a standstill since he found out he shares an identity number with another man of foreign nationality.
Mr Simelane (41) of Thusiville in Ermelo discovered this in July last year after his bank refused him access to his banking account and instead sent him to the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) to verify his identity.
DHA officials told him that his identity document (ID) was blocked, because of a duplicate having been been issued.
Mr Simelane first applied for an ID in 1994 at Fernie and has never lost it.
Life for him and his TB-infected brother has become extremely difficult, as they both depend on their mother’s pension, which is not enough for the whole family.
Mr Simelane said it was painful to move from being a breadwinner and provider at home to being completely dependent on his mother’s pension for survival.
His only hope is a speedy resolution to the matter.
“I can’t look for another job or access my money in the bank and it really hurts me,” he said.
Mr Simelane received another shock last Thursday when the Highvelder accompanied him to the DHA offices in Ermelo. To his dismay, he had to hear that there are two more people with whom he shares an identity number.
The other two were issued IDs in 2004 and in 2014.
The matter is under investigation while Mr Simelane’s file was last worked on in May.
In 2011, the DHA announced that they had more than 590 000 duplicate IDs on their records. This is attributed in part to the integration of former homelands and Home Affairs departments into a single non-racial department after 1994.
Research has shown that another reason could be crime syndicates that collude with certain officials to secure fraudulent IDs.
People also change their birth dates or identity numbers with the help of officials in a bid to escape debt obligations or being placed on credit bureau lists.
Lawyer for Human Rights Liesl Muller says blocked IDs equate to the victims being deprived of their nationality and denied access to basic rights, while their status is investigated.
“In the run-up to elections in 1994, there was a scramble to put people on the register to allow them all to vote. The resulting chaos meant a significant number of wholly undocumented people had to be registered, ‘dompas’ numbers had to be translated into regular ID numbers and a great number of people from the homelands had to be incorporated into the population register. Those who had ‘dompas’ numbers, were automatically allocated new ID numbers without their knowledge,” said Ms Muller in a documented report.
