• Minister of Home Affairs Leon Schreiber has promised to modernise the department through digitalisation.
• While digital solutions may help address current problems, care must be taken to avoid a digital disaster.
• Cybercriminals are constantly on the hunt for new targets and we can’t pretend moving to digital will eliminate all fraud within Home Affairs.

For many, if not all, South Africans, a trip to the local Home Affairs office is a dreadful experience. Not only does one have to contend with lines that stretch beyond the horizon but “the system offline” can turn that experience into a waste of time.

Newly minted Minister of Home Affairs, Leon Schreiber has pushed hard to address the issues within that department in the months since he was placed in the position. In little over three months, he and his team have cleared a decade long backlog at the department and he isn’t done yet.

The Minister this week addressed Parliament, vowing to stem the rot within Home Affairs that he calls a systemic crisis threatening national security.

On the back of a Miss South Africa controversy and the deportation of 95 Libyans here illegally, Schreiber says that these incidents are not isolated and highlight long-standing problems within the department.

“The number one lesson from these cases is that the lack of a modern digital system to process all applications, adjudications and communication at Home Affairs is the root cause of the national security threat we face in this sector,” the minister told Parliament.

“The common denominator you will see in all of these presentations is that Home Affairs systems are vulnerable to fraud, corruption and discretion because they are outdated, antiquated, paper-based, manual and, therefore, open to subversion,” he added.

So, Schreiber is proposing a modernisation of the Home Affairs system and we’re fully in favour of this as digitalisation has been shown in the past to drive efficiency and make fraud and corruption tougher.

However, we feel that Schreiber views digitalisation as a solve all when it really isn’t.

The minister says that fraud within Home Affairs is only possible because the systems has gaps that allow for human intervention, but digital systems are just as prone to human meddling as the paper-based systems are.

The trouble with a digital system is that – especially as regards Home Affairs – it would need to live on the public web and as we know, cybercriminals love things that exist on the public web.

If Home Affairs is to embark digitalisation, cybersecurity needs to be top of mind throughout the process. We’re not just talking about securing the online servers but endpoints as well.

Too often have we seen computers at Home Affairs with USB ports exposed to the public. This sounds like a minor thing but a ne’er-do-well looks at that and see an opportunity, especially if that USB port provides a gateway to a server where every South African’s personal information resides.

The minister went on to say that, “a platform built on machine learning would enable us to process applications within seconds in a watertight manner, without any space for fraud.”

In our experience, fraud doesn’t disappear in a digital system. Sure, it becomes easier to spot through a single pane of glass but don’t discount how creative and wily cybercriminals are.

It’s also important to consider how employees at Home Affairs are trained on a digital system. It’s all good and well to develop a system but if nobody can use it effectively, it’s a fool’s errand. Beyond that, the system has to have scope to be upgraded over time and improved upon in future.

We fully support Home Affairs getting a digital face lift but we need to be careful when viewing it as a golden solution that will fix all of our current problems. It may very well do that, but with cybercriminals targeting the public sector with increasing regularity, we need to be careful we don’t introduce a new swathe of problems that take another two or more decades to solve.