Johannesburg - While a number of challenges have cropped up in the process to document Zimbabwean nationals living in South Africa, the deadline will not be extended beyond the end of the year.
The warning was issued by Home Affairs Director General, Mkuseli Apleni.
Instead, the department will monitor the process daily and make adjustments where necessary.
Apleni, who visited Home Affairs offices in Pretoria and Johannesburg on Friday, said it was important for officials to conduct site inspections to "see what is happening on the ground and address those issues."
The areas of concern include Zimbabweans not understanding what documents they are required to produce; the lack of material in Zimbabweans' home languages; the accessibility of the necessary forms and long queues.
More than 10 000 Zimbabwean nationals have applied for permits to stay in South Africa since a special documentation process was opened on 20 September.
Undocumented Zimbabweans living is South Africa have until 31 December to apply to the department to have their stay in the country registered.
Apleni, who also met with the Documentation of Zimbabweans Project (DZP) Stakeholders Forum, said information on what documents were needed was filtering down from too many sources, resulting in confusion.
He said this information needed to originate from Home Affairs head office only.
The information also needed to be in languages that Zimbabwean nationals were familiar with. To this end, the department is working on pamphlets and a radio programme as a means of communicating the process.
The application forms Zimbabweans have to complete need to be more readily available to ensure they do not have spend hours in a queue just to receive a form, said Apleni.
Home Affairs should also streamline the queues to ensure the entire process moves quicker.
Applicants waiting in queues are allocated numbers, and Apleni said this seemed to be working well. He called on others offices to implement a similar procedure.
The allocation of numbers ensures that someone who was next in line when the office closed on a particular day, would be at the front of the queue the next, he explained.
Mike Nyamabebvu, coordinator of the Solidarity Peace Trust and one of the members of the DZP forum, said it was unacceptable that people were sleeping in the streets outside Home Affairs offices.
"The problem of sleeping in queues is beginning to trample on the dignity of humanity. It is a situation that needs to be dealt with urgently," he said.
If a numbering process was in place, there was no need for people to sleep in queues as they could return the next day.
He called on the stakeholders to explain the process to people and stressed that there was no needed to flood certain Home Affairs offices, as there were no restrictions on where Zimbabweans could apply for their documentation.
