On the impeached population register, dissociated citizenry and beyond
[Some extracts below. Read the full Opinion as published on Business Day].
Accurate information about the population is vital for the public and private sectors to be able to make effective decisions and implement policies properly, the writer says. Picture: 123RF
US President Donald Trump recently stated that many centenarians, allegedly aged from 100 up to 360, have been receiving social security benefit payments in the US. Though these have been revealed to be inaccurate and inflated numbers, evidence of any such payments over an extended period would be symptomatic of a defective population register.
Government efficiency can easily be undermined by a flawed population register. Accurate information about the population is vital for the public and private sectors to be able to make effective decisions and implement policies properly. Perfecting record collection, promoting and facilitating population interaction with those records and purging errors is rightfully a goal of any functioning democracy, but for some — including SA — implementation remains an ambition that faces many practical challenges.
In its early stages of implementation (1950s-1990s) the SA population register was underpinned by racial panopticism, and today it remains encumbered by bureaucratic mismanagement and incompetence, fraud and the phenomenon of citizenry dissociation. The National Population Register thus remains highly inaccurate. The ripple effect of this, with a national census with an undercount believed to be 30% or more, should be cause of great concern.
For decades many SA citizens have dissociated themselves from the register and its purpose. About 100,000 children born in SA every year are not registered at birth. To this number one must add all foreign-born SA children who were not registered at birth over the years. Unsurprisingly, late registration of births, which the department of home affairs wanted to stop entirely in 2015, remains a necessity in the SA landscape.
Many South Africans who have married abroad have, over the years, failed to register their marriages in SA. This has led to a recent pattern of rejections of spousal visas and permanent residence applications, despite that in terms of the SA Immigration Act the definition of “marriage” includes “a marriage concluded in terms of the laws of a foreign country”.
The department has no way to know whether a citizen has married overseas, has had children, or has acquired another citizenship, unless the citizen stays proactively connected with the SA government. Citizenry dissociation is partly responsible for the impeachment of the population register.
By Claudia Pizzocri | CEO at Eisenberg & Associates Inc.