What can I do to get Home Affairs in to unblock my ID?

The long answer

Thank you for your email asking what you can do to get Home Affairs in Bloemfontein to unblock your ID after giving them all the proof they requested many months ago.

Unfortunately, this is a situation that many people find themselves in when they are dealing with Home Affairs – long, long, unexplained delays.

Apparently, this is because Home Affairs does not have the capacity to deal efficiently with the amount of requests they receive. This has been going on for a long time. 

In 2013, Liesl Muller of Lawyers for Human Rights said that a blocked ID number was the same as being deprived of your citizenship while your status was being investigated. In other words, becoming stateless. She said that anyone could become a victim of ID blocking and if your number was being used fraudulently, it could be blocked without your knowledge. 

She said the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA) compelled Home Affairs to give persons whose IDs had been blocked written reasons for the decision and to tell them what they could do about it. 

When Home Affairs receives a PAJA request, they are required to respond within 30 days but, unfortunately, Home Affairs seems incapable of getting the required information to the person within the 30 days or even 60 days if they request an extension. Remember that this kind of delay was being discussed in 2013. Nothing has changed for the better since then and now, under lockdown, Home Affairs is taking even longer to respond. 

So perhaps you should think of asking for assistance from an organisation like Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), which has a Statelessness Unit that deals with problems like yours and has a lot of experience in dealing with Home Affairs.

To get in touch with the Statelessness Unit, email Liesl Muller (Unit Manager) at liesl@lhr.org.za or call the Johannesburg LHR office on 011 339 1960.