It took Charlene Feyerabend, 32, a mere 767 days of struggling to get a valid, South African ID.
Going without since February 2014 meant that she could not retain her bank account, was unable to register to vote in the upcoming local elections and couldn’t receive payments on her provident fund, among other problems. Her driver’s license expired in November last year but she could not get it renewed without a valid ID.
“I phoned in and sent emails weekly but I was given the complete runaround,” she complained, adding, “I cannot go the Department of Home Affairs [DHA] every week as I am a working mother who’s job will be affected”.
At the end of March, a desperate Charlene contacted the Record in hopes of publishing an article on her plight. It took the swift, hard work of Pearl Poto, who heads DHA in Roodepoort, and her staff to change her mind. Two years, a month and eight days after initially applying for it, she received an SMS to inform her that her new ID is ready for collection.
Since acknowledging receipt of a request for comment on 29 March, Poto investigated every detail of her application to see where the trouble had slipped in.
“We detected an issue with her fingerprints, but it concerned me that the client returned to our offices at least twice to redo her fingerprints without any success in the system,” Poto told the Record during a follow-up interview.
Poto went on to explain that, in Charlene’s case, the images of her fingerprints on the system and those on the physical application papers kept returning as a miss-match. This warranted calling the client back to redo fingerprints, but only so many times. She said people’s fingerprints often print faintly, which means the DHA will have to call them back in.
“We had also upgraded our systems in February this year and I think the upgraded system could better match the images, so her application went through without a hitch when we captured it this time,” Poto said.
Charlene was impressed with the quick service after the issue was detected, saying Poto gave her regular updates on their progress throughout and how it was painless to collect the ID, taking less than 10 minutes. She was able to use the ID to register to vote during the final registration weekend, last weekend.
“I think the issue, for us regular citizens, is knowing who to contact in times like these. I followed the regular route and spoke to this person and that person, and heard ‘please hold’ and ‘here’s a reference number’ more often than I care to remember.
“Thank you to both [DHA] Roodepoort and the Record for being great contact points and key players in sorting this out fleetly.”
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