Cape Town - The Department of Home Affairs is this year focusing on transforming its staff to build more caring and security-conscious employees, the department's Director General Mkuseli Apleni said on Tuesday.
Apleni was briefing media in Parliament following the department's appearance before the National Assembly's Committee on Home Affairs.
Following the unqualified audit the department received last year - the first time since 1995 that it had achieved such an audit - the department is now pushing for a clean audit, he said.
"[The] policies are grounded, they are there. The only thing we want to concentrate on now is transforming of this department, to be able to be responsive to the needs of the people, but to do that the main pillar is the people [staff]," said Apleni.
He said without effective and responsive staff, any modern equipment or processes introduced by the department would not have the desired effect.
The department's staff compliment has been increasing at about 3% a year, but this growth is limited by what is available in its budget allocation, he said.
In the 2010/11 financial year, 38% of home affairs management staff were women - a fall from 39% the year before, but Apleni said the department was working to achieve gender parity.
Home affairs had also ensured that people with disabilities made up management so that matters concerning disabled people were also attended to, he said.
In terms of race groups 0.9% of staff are Indians, 5.9% coloured, 8.3% white and 84.9% black Africans.
The department also wants to establish sound immigration policies and systems, with a strong focus on land borders and sea ports, he said.
To this end, the department had received R110 million from the National Treasury to improve housing at ports of entry.
He also reported back in steady improvement made by the department in registering births.
The department is running a campaign to speed up the registration of births -many people still only registering births years later. Birth certificates are vital as one cannot secure an ID document without one.
Apleni said the department was now mooting penalties for those who failed to register the birth of a child within 30 days.
People are starting to heed the call to register births within 30 days.
The department recorded 445 883 births registered within 30 days in 2009/10 and this increased to 500 525 registered in 2010/11
In the first 10 months of 2011/12, a total of 455 000 births had been registered within 30 days.
Those births registered between 31 days and 14 years have fallen from 1.1 million in 2009/10 to 1.09m in 2010/11.
In the first 10 months of 2011/12, just over 908 700 births had been registered between 31 days and 14 years after birth.
Those late registrations - those registered 15 years after birth - moved from 174 084 in 2009/10 to 190 011 in 2010/11 - with only 89 371 registered in the first 10 months of 2011/12.
Apleni said the decrease in late registrations was a welcome sign that the department was clearing the backlog.
To aid the project the department is also looking to add more hospitals to its birth-registration system. So far 235 hospitals out of a total of 375 hospitals are registered on the system, with the remaining 140 hospitals having to submit birth registrations manually.
The department aimed to link the 140 on its system within the next two years, Apleni said.
Apleni also made it clear that the department would not be running another Zimbabwean Dispensation.
