The Minister of Civil Affairs, Dr. Leon Schreiber, reported in a written response to Parliament that the department's offices lost 13,867 hours due to system failures during the last fiscal year. This is equivalent to 578 full working days without service provision.
Furthermore, 11,479 hours were lost due to disruptions in the national population register—the database that stores all information on births, deaths, marriages, and identification numbers in the country.
However, Schreiber also informed Parliament that the department cannot yet state the exact amount of time citizens actually lost, as it has never had the ability to measure this.
He stated: 'The department is not yet capable of providing a technically verified quantitative measure of the total elapsed time during which civil affairs services were unavailable at the national level since June 30, 2024.' He added that current monitoring tools record incidents separately by networks, infrastructure, applications, biometric platforms, the national population register, and external service providers, but they do not yet measure service availability across the entire transaction path, including office or citizen-facing channels, and all core systems and integrations.
This data was presented in response to an inquiry from EFF member Tapelo Mogale, who asked about the number of lost hours since Schreiber took office on June 30, 2024, as well as which provinces and offices were most affected and what measures are being taken.
The department was able to provide daily reports kept by provinces regarding lost hours in frontline offices. Both sets of figures show a sharp decrease compared to the previous year: hours lost in frontline offices decreased from 35,426 in 2024/25, representing a 61% improvement, while hours lost in the population register decreased from 14,720, representing a 22% improvement.
Schreiber clarified that provincial records reflect the issues faced by offices but do not constitute a national assessment. He emphasized: 'These records give an important insight into the impact at the office level, but they are not equivalent to a nationwide outage. For example, an outage experienced simultaneously by several offices accumulates as multiple office hours. The figures may also include partial outages where some services remained available.'
Every province recorded a reduction in overall downtime in frontline offices. The most affected last year were North West with a loss of 2,460 hours, followed by Gauteng with 2,296 hours and KwaZulu-Natal with 2,291 hours. Regarding the population register, Limpopo lost the highest number of hours—3,707 hours—surpassing KZN with 2,101 hours and North West with 1,562 hours. Furthermore, three provinces—KZN, North West, and Northern Cape—recorded an increase in lost hours for this indicator compared to the previous year.
Schreiber noted that provincial metrics are used to determine the direction of resource allocation by the department, but they should not be viewed as a ranking. He explained: 'Differences in the number of offices, local infrastructure, and reporting methods mean that they cannot yet be considered a definitive comparative indicator of service availability across provinces.'
The response also outlined an action plan to prevent failures. The department's service level with the State Information Technology Agency was upgraded from bronze to silver; 226 connections were moved to fiber optics, 12 to LTE, and 69 old Diginet lines still need replacement. A total of 182 offices were migrated from the outdated desktop system, 48 core application servers were replaced, and a power failure at the biometric verification site was resolved.
As of May of this year, 439 offices have been migrated to the HANIS biometric platform, while 121 are still running on ABIS and awaiting migration. Schreiber reported that a new monitoring system is being developed that will show whether the service is operational from the public's perspective. 'This will allow for accurate reporting on service availability, incident duration, affected offices, and root causes of downtime.'


