DUNDEE KZN: Why Home Affairs left their stations

Courier readers complained about being left unattended by Home Affairs personnel on Thursday morning, December 14.
“I am at the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) right now. Personnel of DHA left their stations at 10:15, all at once, and left the public halfway through transactions. It is now 11:30 and there is no personnel in sight; this is unbelievable!” wrote Frikkie Coetzee at the time.

Mbongeni Mhlongo, office manager at DHA Dundee, responded that: “It’s true; we left the office in the morning because we had IT specialists who were going to come in to fix our server. However, in the morning before we left our counters, we explained to them (customers) that IT personnel had arrived to fix our server.
“We did not just abandon them and leave.
“We had two IT technicians who came in – one from PMB and the other one from Amajuba – to upgrade our server.
“Unfortunately, they had to do the upgrade during working hours.”

The DHA in Dundee has an arrangement with all the schools in the district to sort out ID cards for the learners, which sometimes also delays other clients.
Mbongeni explained that: “We currently have a lot of learners coming into our offices, but we do have a programme with all the schools in all the seven wards, since we do not have a mobile truck to do IDs for high school learners. We have arranged with the school principals from different schools to come down to our offices with their learners in school uniform to do their IDs.
“On these days, we explain to the community that we will start with the learners’ applications first, before doing theirs (as the learners still go back to school after we are done with their ID applications).
“By doing this, we are trying to reduce the number of learners coming into our offices and missing lessons.”

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