www.thesouthafrican.com
8 - 14 October 2013
Issue 535
41770
CONTRACTING? TIME TO EARN MORE
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SA HIGH COMMISSION: IS IT A PASS OR A FAIL?
| Whether it’s a passport renewal or birth registration, at some stage you’re likely to have used the services of the oft-criticised SA High Commission Home Affairs Section in London. Do they deserve more credit than they’re given? We ask you to rate how well South Africa House serves your needs by BRETT PETZER THE SOUTH African Home Affairs Consular Section of the SA High Commission in London is a government department that wields immense power over international South Africans and non-South Africans alike in terms of travel, immigration and citizenship related to South Africa. Whether you settle in bucolic Middle England or pulsing London, at some stage you are likely to need the services of the SA Home Affairs UK office, for example, to request retention of your SA citizenship when obtaining a British passport or to register the birth of a child. For some, this experience is mostly seamless; for others, lost documents, misinformation and delays create a refined form of bureaucratic torture. We asked the South African community abroad rate service they have received at the Consular Section (share your story on www. thesouthafrican.com/community). We are putting together a report based on your feedback which we shall present to the new high commissioner to the UK. If reader complaints are anything to go by, His Excellency Zola Skweyiya’s successor as South African High Commissioner will have plenty of work to do from Day One. Having polled our readership online and on social media, a picture is emerging of more negative experiences than positive
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at the Consular Section, with little improvement over time. The most serious comments related to potentially life-altering bureaucratic failures, such as the loss of essential documents reported by Facebook commenter Carole Donovan, “They managed to lose documents and a passport they have processed and not even delivered. “ Less alarming, but equally frustrating, have been the delays. Donovan’s birth certificate for a newborn took 8 months. Facebook commenter Emil F Reichhart’s passport took 7 months, while Sibella Ryman waited almost a year to get hers. Readers tend to fall into to three camps when it comes to the High Commission’s general service. One large group, like the above, takes issue with the way SA House conducts its core business. For the other large group, staff attitudes are particularly troubling. The third group is most concerned by the infrastructure and communications of the consular section. Speaking for the first group, TSA.com commenter Karen said, “We applied for an unabridged marriage certificate in July 2010 – still have not received it after numerous visits. The staff are also unashamedly lazy. One member of staff sat watching a line of people waiting at an unattended counter for 45 minutes but refused to help anyone as ‘he only dealt with visas’. On a different occasion we had to wait an hour only to
INSIDE:
p6 | Exclusive interview with Trevor Noah on turning racism into laughs p11 | Drones enlisted in the fight against rhino poaching
p13 | ‘Disneyland’ at Vic Falls? Not likely, says Zim
| SOUTH AFRICAN NOIR ROMANCE: Brandon Auret and Cara Roberts star in ‘Durban Poison’, a moody South African road movie inspired by the true story of a pair of outlaw KwaZulu-Natal lovers, which will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival this week. Read our interview with director Andrew Worsdale on page 5
have the staff member (that two different colleagues advised us would help us) refuse to help us until she had served everyone behind us in the queue as ‘she did passports first and then everything else’.” On Facebook, Andrew Sinclair and Carole Donovan commented on issues of basic business practice. Sinclair, speaking of a December 2009 experience, found that staff
attitudes were less of a problem than alarming administrative oversights: “They processed our passport renewals and application for clearance for dual citizenship really quickly but in the case of our passports they failed to return them by post despite me having enclosed a self addressed special delivery envelope and I only found out that they were about to return the passports to Pretoria Continued on page 2
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