A new Home Affairs branch was officially opened by Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi and KwaZulu-Natal Premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube at the Pavilion Shopping Centre in Durban on Monday.
Home Affairs is seeking to make it easier for the public to access services.
The premier said this branch will help ease congestion at other branches including the uMngeni, Pinetown and Durban CBD offices.
Members of the public will be able to apply for their smart ID cards and passports at the Pavilion branch.
The opening of the branch was welcomed by the Group CEO of the Pareto Group, Malose Kekana.
The Pareto Group has partnered with the department and announced that they will be opening more Home Affairs offices in their malls.
The minister announced that they have already secured Tyger Valley Shopping Centre in Cape Town and Southgate Mall in Johannesburg for additional branches through their partnership with Pareto Group.
Motsoaledi said opening Home Affairs branches in shopping malls was part of their expansion plans in a bid to make service delivery more convenient for the public.
The Pavilion Shopping Centre is the third mall to operate a branch.
“We are no longer going to rely on traditional Home Affairs offices only.
We have expanded to the malls and we have already started expanding to the banks,” he said.
This expansion by the department is to assist with what the minister referred to as “the malady that many people are not aware of”, the issue of civil registration.
Motsoaledi said there are about 11% of South Africans that are not registered.
Last week, during a media briefing he spoke about the plans being put into place to encourage foreign workers to take up remote working visas in South Africa.
Asked on Monday about the view that foreign national entrepreneurs experience challenges with obtaining visas in order to set up businesses in South Africa, Motsoaledi said he was aware of the issue.
However, he said work was being done to rectify this.
“We have what we call the Corporate Affairs Visa where we have syndicated the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, Department of Employment and Labour as well as Department of Home Affairs working together. So, for a corporate visa we do not waste time,” said Motsoaledi.
Last week Motsoaledi announced that Cabinet has approved the Final White Paper On Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection.
However, the White Paper has not been without criticism with the Helen Suzman Foundation saying that it “fails the threshold for sound government policy-making because it provides an inscrutable solution without properly defining the challenges which migration poses to South Africa”.
Asked about the criticism, Motsoaledi said it was based on “ignorance”.
The Mercury