Radical fingerprint plan for school kids

Home Affairs unveils new strategy to curb ID fraud

CHILDREN at primary schools across the country will be fingerprinted in a move to combat identity fraud — if a radical plan by the department of home affairs gets the all-clear.

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South African identity documents and passports have come under increased scrutiny by the international community because of the ease with which criminals can obtain them.

Briefing the media yesterday in Pretoria, newly appointed Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said the nation’s population register was in a mess and needed to be “cleaned up”.

“Every child below the age of 16 will be registered at school. We are trying to check at what age we can take fingerprints because we want, as an interim measure, to take fingerprints before the age of 16 so that we can put those fingerprints in our population register,” she said.

“We will be going into primary schools, and this campaign will take us two to three years,” Dlamini-Zuma said.

“We need to clean up the system so as to determine who is South African when people apply for ID and travel documents.”

But senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, Johan Burger, advised that Dlamini- Zuma should be “wary” of implementing such a programme.

He said: “I find that a little difficult to accept because there is a stigma attached to fingerprints being taken at primary school level. Fingerprints are associated with criminals.

“This will lead to [children] thinking that they will be associated with criminals and, in that sense, I think that this action will be taking the fight against crime too far.”

However, Burger did concede that there was a need for a more comprehensive database of fingerprints.

“The crime situation is frightening and we can no longer support the issue of confidentiality, but we need to think carefully when it comes to children,” he said.

Dlamini-Zuma warned that, because of corruption in her department, the country’s population register was compromised and had no standing in the international community.

“You can’t be sure that someone carrying a South African ID [is] 100 percent South African and deserves to carry that ID.

“When someone has a birth certificate that says they were born in South Africa, you cannot be sure that they were indeed born in SA. Some countries now demand visas when we did not need visas before and it’s because they can no longer be sure that when someone produces a passport at a point of entry in their countries that they are, indeed, South Africans … internationally our passports have become suspect,” Dlamini-Zuma said.

The most publicised example of this was Britain’s decision to add South Africans to its list of foreign nationals needing visas to enter the UK.

In February, South Africa joined Bolivia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Venezuela as countries whose nationals need visas to visit the UK.

This decision has affected about 420,000 South Africans who visit that country each year.

Dlamini-Zuma said she will negotiate with the UK once the population register is cleaned up.

“The ball is in our court. We have to renegotiate, but not now. We have to clean our home first before we renegotiate,” Dlamini-Zuma said.

The minister vowed that she was also going to be tough on crime within her department .

“It’s not a secret that whilst the majority of people at Home Affairs do their work honestly and diligently, there is a critical mass of people who are corrupt. That is why we find our documents not being secure.

“The wholesale selling of identity documents is unpatriotic, it shows you don’t care for your country, you are ready to undermine the security of your country and you are not proud of yourself as a South African,” Dlamini-Zuma said.