Hon House Chair, hon Deputy Minister, hon Minister and hon members, not forgetting hon guests in the gallery. Chairperson, the strategic purpose of the Department of Home Affairs is to effectively and efficiently determine and safeguard the identity and status of citizens. It must also regulate immigration to ensure security, promote development and fulfil South Africa's international obligations.
Home Affairs is the backbone of the national security, service delivery and citizen development since it is the custodian in the unique identity of all citizens and documented foreigners residing in South Africa. Home Affairs has a responsibility to make sure that all South Africans have identities and statuses.
Furthermore, Home Affairs must maintain a credible and secure nation's population register must maintain a credible and secure nation's population's register, supply enabling documents to citizens as well as foreign nationals. Home Affairs plays a decisive role as the backbone of the developmental state and is central to
enabling security and service delivery. It plays a crucial role in enabling all South Africans to proudly claim their citizenship, their identity and their dignity.
The department must, therefore, balance its security and service delivery functions and develop strong ties with communities.
Hon Chair, any evaluation of the performance of the department must be assessed against the Medium-Term Strategic Framework, MTSF, of the ANC government. The document guides the programmes and ensures that there is a comprehensive response to the challenges of the current conjuncture.
The Presidency's 20-year review of 2014 and the National Planning Commission's 2011 diagnostic report highlight that poverty, inequality and unemployment continue to negatively affect the lives of many people. Too few people have work, investment is too slow and education lags behind our requirements.
The weak state of the economy impedes our efforts to reach our developmental goals. The second phase of our democratic transition calls for bold and decisive steps to place the economy on a
qualitatively different path that eliminates poverty, creates jobs and sustainable livelihoods and substantively reduces inequality.
This requires a radical socioeconomic transformation and a sustained focus on addressing uneven quality of service delivery. The key areas that Home Affairs responds to in terms of the medium-term strategic work are effectively defending, protecting, securing and managing our borders, and further ensuring that identities of all persons in the country are known, secured and streamlining regulations to reduce the burden of importing core and critical skills that are needed for the economy.
Hon Chair, in securing an effective and efficient management of immigration, South Africa is a signatory to international conventions and protocols as per the United Nations, UN, Convention of Rights of Refugees of 1951 and Organisation of African Unity, OAU, Convention of 1969 on the protection of rights of refugees and asylum seekers. It is very cognisant of our international and moral obligation towards meeting these obligations.
South Africa is also one of the largest receiving states for refugees and asylum seekers in the world. In this regard we have an obligation to ensure that all asylum seekers are issued with valid
documentation enabling them to return to the country legally as well as speedily reviewing decisions that have been found to be unfounded and manifestly unfounded.
Extraordinary measures employed in finalising applications for asylum seekers such as improving information technology, extending operating hours, opening refugees' reception offices on Saturdays, improving filing systems and the queue management.
The Department of Home Affairs must also revisit permit conditions and put an effective mechanism in place to ensure that they create a balanced and acceptable degree of protection of the labour law. This must, however, be done to not affect other sectors of the economy such as tourism and other labour intensive sectors.
There must also be better co-ordination between the Department of Home Affairs and law enforcement agencies to improve the implementation of the Immigration Act. This must be done to ensure that asylum seekers' and refugees' entry and their movement within the republic are well handled and their whereabouts are well-known.
The Department of Home Affairs must develop a system for monitoring application timeframes. Hon members, the mandate has meant the
transformation of Home Affairs into a modern digitally secure custodian of national identity responding to the present and future needs and circumstances, and run by professionals operating in a highly secure environment to protect the records of the nation within the government system.
In line with the National Development Plan, NDP, Home Affairs makes four critical contributions that have already been mentioned by my fellow comrades. The transformation of Home Affairs is about ensuring that it is an essential pillar in the pursuit of these four critical areas and a reliable partner for ordinary people, government departments and the private sector in pursuit of these goals that are so central to the security of the nation.
Chairperson, like the previous comrades have already mentioned, the ANC's 54th National Conference in December 2017 deliberated on the state of Home Affairs as a key functionary of the state. The conference raised its concerns over presence of undocumented migrants in the republic which causes both an economic and security threat to the country. The conference went on to cite empirical evidence that the majority of asylum seekers do not qualify for refugee status and protection, but are rather economic migrants.
It deliberated on these challenges relating to legislation regulating access to citizenship by foreign nationals and acknowledged the initiative of the department that embarked on modernisation and development of a single national identity system which is based on biometrics to be also used as well as integrated justice system to fight crime more effectively.
The conference clearly articulated the need to reconsider policy relating to centres for asylum seekers during consideration of their statuses. Concurrently, the ANC recognises perceptions that arise during the process and calls for awareness programmes to combat xenophobia and to educate society against narrow nationalism.
The conference welcomed stakeholder forum of the department as a demonstration of the people governing as per freedom charter. While immigration is about enforcement of laws, rules and regulations; it is of critical and strategic importance that it be anchored and aligned to the promotion of economic development, job creation and trade investment in South Africa and within Southern African Development Community, SADC, region. The African nation and ... [Time expired.] Thank you.