Please accept our profound gratitude at the opportunity granted us by these Honourable Members to brief you about our budget proposals.

Further, we wish to congratulate the Honourable Chairpersons for their elevation to the high seats they occupy, and thus to convey the wishes of the Minister and the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, as well as the rest of the Department of Home Affairs, that we shall cooperate with both the Chairpersons and the Committees in the discharge of our respective responsibilities.

You have asked us to our delight to brief you on the budget proposals of our Department.

We are here today in positive response to your invitation, hoping that this shall assist you in performing your political oversight functions.

We trust therefore that you shall offer us your frank and constructive opinion on all the matters we shall place before you.

At this moment, allow us to convey to you the sincerest apologies of the Minister, the Honourable Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, who as a result of an official trip abroad, is unable to be present here today.

The intention of my relatively short remarks is to introduce the presentation from the Department, which shall outline our programme priorities as well as proposed budget allocations.

The Department of Home Affairs has entered a new phase, a phase both coinciding with and itself made necessary by the advent of the Second Decade of our Freedom.

During this phase, we are determined to transform the Department of Home Affairs from an institution for the humiliation of the majority, dispensing wholesale injustice and indignity against the majority of South Africans.

For centuries, this had been a Department of ‘home affairs’ for some, while for the majority it was a strange and reviled place where they were officially classified as non-peoples, and allotted their roles as beasts of burden, slave and super-exploitable labour.

For years the black majority have treated visiting the Home Affairs offices as a painful burden, which they were always happy and ready to forgo because they could not bear being treated with indignity and disdain.

Whenever they thought of Home Affairs, they imagined an inhospitable staff, filthy offices and very bad service.

What has become clear during the past ten years is that the crisis at Home Affairs runs deep, and it involves people, infrastructure, the package of services offered and the policies and legislation governing some of these.

Accordingly, the Department has had to undergo a significant change of focus and, hence, in a number of areas, reprioritise its work as reflected in the change in its spending outcomes.

Fortunately, a lot of work has been done to ensure that most of our people in the Department accept that CHANGE is required.

In that way, therefore, the Department’s Turnaround Strategy has passed its first test.

Since briefing the Portfolio Committee in March this year, the Department has taken its plans a step further, and the Turnaround Strategy has been incorporated into the Strategic Plan and will shortly be reflected in the MTEF submission.

As you may be aware, the Minister and I have been presented with the Strategic Plan and the Department is in the process of accommodating our views with regard to the issues of policy and strategy, the result of which interaction shall shortly be presented to Parliament.

Nevertheless, I must mention that the strategic challenges of the Department have been organised in ten critical intervention areas.

Ultimately, the Turnaround Strategy seeks drastically to improve the quality of the service that we provide to both our people as well as to our foreign guests by creating new programmes and systems, transforming our people and overhauling our infrastructure better to be able to serve the requirements of the new South Africa.

We shall seek to create a new institutional culture, new value and ethos that will underpin both the people and the new technology.

We shall in due course table before you timeframes for the fulfilment of our objectives, mandates and programmes.

The Department of Home Affairs has two core functions: civic services and immigration, and the budget allocation shall follow these lines.

Among other things, you are all aware that the President has committed government, in three months time, to table before parliament amendments to the Immigration Act, to simplify the act and drastically improve it.

At the same time, he has instructed the Department to develop new Immigration Regulations.

As the Minister has already announced, we shall follow a very strict timetable to comply with this, given that the President has himself directed us to act with urgency on the matter, which shall require that we table the Amendment Bill to Parliament by June 24^th so that both the National Assembly and the NCOP pass it by the August deadline.

We shall return to request you, once we table the Amendment Bill to Parliament, to engage in public hearings in July.

Further, the Minister shall, in the coming few weeks, announce detailed plans for policy review in order to align our policies with the broader perspective of government.

The Budget proposals we shall table before you then shall address themselves to improving our system of administration, including through the training of our staff and management, and recruiting interns with the intention to improve service delivery.

Of course, improving our administration will require that we urgently fill all the vacancies open in the Department according to our resources capacity.

Our Department will in July recruit and register 350 young people for the internship programme. The Directorates have all been urged to prepare for these young interns, and they have all identified the mentors so that the interns do not just idle and loiter around.

We will further spend more resources on addressing the challenge to improve services to citizens, among others, to curb the fraud and corruption with which our Department has, to the present, been beset.

Part of improving services to citizens will, of course, include endeavours to bring Home Affairs offices and/or services close to the people.

The resources we will spend on IT infrastructure and programmes will be aimed exactly at dealing with the above-mentioned challenges, and further to improve the IT infrastructure in all our offices, providing 67 mobile units, upgrading the population register, finalising the elections documentation management system, and finalising the production of the smart card.

In that regard, we will pay greater and focused attention to improving the management of our IT systems through developing more capacity through such measures as the recruitment of new staff, filling in the existing vacancies and recruiting interns to supplement staff.

Our intention with regard to IT systems is that they must lead to the modernisation of the Department so that we offer quick, effective, efficient and quality service to the citizens; to ensure further that we are able to manage our data and upgrade our population register and ensure effective communication between our offices at all tiers.

In addition, we shall allocate resources towards auxiliary and associated services such as the IEC, the Government Printing Works, the Films and Publications Board and others.

You are all aware that the term of office of the incumbent Commissioners of the IEC is coming to an end at the end of June.

However, given that we have local elections pending in a short space of time and hence we do not have the luxury of time, government has decided to request Parliament to amend the IEC Act to allow for the extension of the terms of office of incumbent Commissioners.

Finally, we will allocate requisite budgets to provinces on the basis of the volume of their work.

In pursuit of the objective of a people’s contract for change and a better life for all, the Minister and Deputy Minister shall continue to pay planned and unplanned visits to provinces and local Home Affairs offices.

In the execution of all these tasks, the Minister and Deputy Minister shall provide hands-on leadership to the Department.

The principle that will underpin the Department will be coordination and integration in the planning and implementation of programmes. The days of every Directorate for itself are over! There is one government and one Department, and we must all become team players.

You shall notice from the briefing that we were still bedevilled by roll-over problems during this ending financial term, but we hope we shall be able to address this scourge during the coming financial terms through effective and efficient planning and implementation of our programmes.

I trust that this short input does introduce, as broadly as possible, the issues contained in the budget proposals of our Department.

I trust further that this shall get your broad approval and close scrutiny given the pivotal role of the Department of Home Affairs to the programme of the government to fight poverty and create work.

We too, in the Department of Home Affairs, are part of the People’s Contract for a better life for all!

Please receive, Chairpersons the Home Affairs delegation that shall lead the budget briefing to these august Committees and Honourable Members:

Mr. Barry Gilder, the Director General,

Mr. Pat Nkambule, the Chief Financial Officer,

Ms. Zanele Mongalo, the Acting Chief Director: IT,

Ms. Lorraine Makola, the Acting Chief Director: Immigration,

Mr. Joel Chavalala, the Acting Chief Director: Civic Services,

Mr. Corrie Smit, Programme Manager of the Turnaround Strategy,

Ms. Phindiwe Mazomba, Director: Human Resources Development,

Mr. Leslie Mashokwe, Director: Communications, and

Mr. Johan Fick, Director: Strategic and Transformation Management.

Thank you.