No Power, No Progress: Vryheid Home Affairs Office Ran for Three Years Without Electricity

A municipality’s billing dispute turned into a three-year power outage that crippled public service delivery in a KZN town.

It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true: the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) office in Vryheid, northern KwaZulu-Natal, has been operating without electricity for over three years.

The revelation, confirmed by Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber in a recent parliamentary reply, sheds light on just how entangled government inefficiencies have become. The electricity was cut off—not because the Vryheid office owed the municipality money—but due to a completely unrelated dispute over unpaid bills by the Department of Public Works and Infrastructure (DPWI) for its eMondlo office nearby.

Caught in the Crossfire

Essentially, Vryheid’s Home Affairs office was used as collateral in a standoff between two state departments. According to Schreiber, the local municipality flipped the switch to force national government’s hand, hoping the DHA would step in and pay the DPWI’s bill.

That never happened.

Instead, the Vryheid office had to rely on a generator to power crucial systems—hardly a sustainable solution in a country plagued by fuel costs and load shedding. EFF MP Lencel Komane, who raised the issue in Parliament, called the workaround “unreliable” and said the prolonged outage had a “severe impact on service delivery to the local community.”

When the System Is Always Down

This isn’t just a Vryheid problem. Across the country, DHA offices are constantly hamstrung by power cuts and unreliable IT systems. While electricity woes have long been blamed, there’s another culprit in the background: the State Information Technology Agency (SITA).

In January 2024, a SITA system failure knocked out Home Affairs services nationwide, including access to the National Population Register. A year later, another major crash exposed how fragile the department’s digital backbone remains.

“When the system is offline,” South Africans can’t apply for IDs, passports, or birth certificates. The consequences trickle down fast—travel plans are disrupted, job applications delayed, and social grant access blocked.

SITA in the Firing Line

Behind the scenes, SITA has struggled with leadership instability, vacant key posts, and slow procurement processes. Calls are growing louder to end its monopoly over state IT systems.

Both Minister Schreiber and Communications Minister Solly Malatsi have voiced support for allowing departments like Home Affairs to appoint their own private IT service providers. Malatsi criticised SITA’s inefficiencies, while Schreiber went so far as to say the phrase “the system is offline” should be treated like a swear word.

In an attempt to redeem itself, SITA has proposed a five-year, R400 million revamp to rebuild its core infrastructure and upgrade data centres to Tier III standards. It’s even offered a free digital ID solution to DHA—but there’s been no clear movement on that front yet.

The Real-World Impact

At public hearings earlier this year on the new Marriage Bill, Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee paid surprise visits to regional DHA offices. The message from frustrated citizens was consistent: “The system is always offline.”

Committee chair Mosa Chabane later voiced his own frustrations, pointing out that legislation aimed at exempting security cluster departments from relying on SITA’s platforms has stalled. “This failure contributes to the erosion of trust between the department and South Africans,” he said.

Some Progress Amid the Problems

Despite the mess, Home Affairs has made some headway. Most notably, it cleared a backlog of over 247,000 ID applications accumulated since November 2023.

Still, the core issue remains: public service is suffering because basic governance structures, whether it’s paying a municipal bill or maintaining reliable IT aren’t working.

If government departments can’t even keep the lights on, how can citizens expect the systems to be online?

{Source: BusinessTech}

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