I think it would be incorrect to say that there are 4,2 million refugees in South Africa. These figures are being used to hype up emotions, and the Southern African Migration Project has also been making this point. These figures are unscientific and based on no evidence. I think we need to avoid using them. One of the things that we are doing as part of the turnaround strategy is to ensure that there are standard operating procedures in all our offices. The negative spin-off is that where there have been great improvements in terms of our refugee management systems in Cape Town many people have begun to move from other countries towards the Cape Town office. This creates a serious clogging up of the system as they have to deal with large numbers of people.
Secondly, with the introduction of the smart ID card, there will be one form of identification for all categories of people with status in South Africa, including citizens, permanent residents and refugees. The legislative implications in this regard are being considered.
I want to thank hon Weber for supporting the Bill, even though I think her comments were about something else that we are not discussing today. However, she raised important issues which we will come back to at a later stage.
With regard to a leaked report on weaknesses in the system and a lack of integration in the Backlog Project, we initiated the Backlog Project ourselves because we recognised exactly those weaknesses. The intention of the Backlog Project was to help us to scientifically identify the nature of the problems that we were facing. Therefore, it was correct that the report came to us in the manner that it did and highlighted those issues. There are issues which we are addressing in the turnaround project that we are implementing right now.
So the project was successful because we were able to process 111 000 applications. We are, therefore, dealing with the issues that were raised with regard to the weaknesses in our systems and all of those things. Sixty thousand of the cases that we had to deal with were redundant; they were empty files because the people had applied to more than one office. In some instances it was people who sought to get into the system irregularly, some of them through fraud and some of them by trying to get married. We have dealt with all of those issues and we are satisfied.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees indicated in 2006, when he came here, at the South African refugee policy is among the best in the world. The hiatus though was at the level of implementation - the administration of the policy. That is the matter that we are trying to deal with, amongst other things, through this legislation that we are proposing here.
So it is quite good that we had to introduce these changes in order to be able to improve on the implementation of our policies because, as we indicated ourselves, these problems have created great inconvenience for many of the asylum seekers in our country and have undermined their socioeconomic livelihoods. We would like to thank all the hon members for supporting this piece of legislation and for their constructive comments, many of which will be taken on board even when we begin the process to amend the entire immigration policy. Thank you very much.
Debate concluded.
Bill read a second time.