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Frustrated South Africans have been stuck in long queues after the Department of Home Affairs’ systems went offline this week.
Reports indicated the systems have been offline since the New Year started, with the department only confirming an outage.
It said all services it offers, including ID card and passport applications, are suspended.
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“The Department of Home Affairs wishes to regrettably alert citizens that its services are not available at the moment due to a technical problem on the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) mainframe which affects access to the National Population Register (NPR).”
Department spokesperson Siya Qoza told The Citizen the issue affected home affairs offices across the country.
He said technicians and engineers were attending to the matter, and they hoped it would be resolved soon.
A technical glitch in Postbank’s payment systems last year left thousands of Sassa grant recipients, including pensioners, unable to collect their money from ATMs, the post office, or retailers.
Postbank distributes grants on behalf of the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa).
Director of human rights organisation the Black Sash, Rachel Bukasa, said the crisis had caused “a dignity issue”.
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“You have older persons sleeping on the floor because they can’t afford to go home and come back the next day. It’s a dignity issue of people not being able to purchase food, electricity and the basic necessities that they need.
“What needs to be acknowledged here is that people’s dignity rights have been impacted in a horrendous way and an apology that this cannot happen again [is required],” she told Newzroom Afrika.
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