Andrew Stegmann

City Home Affairs closure slammed

IMMIGRATION lobby groups have slammed the Home Affairs Department-contracted Global VFS for poor planning in not being able to cater for the “high volume” of visa applicants in the city.

This comes after an office meant to process visas for foreign nationals in Adderley Street shut down because the landlord, Rennie Properties, had “run foul” of the tenant, Global VFS, due to safety 
concerns.

The closure has led to hundreds of applicants being turned away when they came to submit and collect their documentation.

The VFS Cape Town office served about 300 applicants daily and the landlord had no problem with that number. That changed when Lesotho citizens were able to apply for the Home Affairs Department’s Lesotho Special Permit (LSP).

The number of people seeking to enter the premises sharply increased to about 
1 000 daily, prompting the landlord to close the office.

 Forum for Immigration Practitioners South Africa (FIPSA) provincial chairperson Rod Maxwell said the closure will have far-reaching consequences as applicants whose visas expired yesterday will become illegal.

Maxwell said the problem arose because applicants came to the offices in large numbers, blocking entrances, restaurants and shops situated nearby.

“Indeed our clients are unhappy because due to the closure some applicants have now become illegal, with devastating consequences on their lives,” said Maxwell.

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Andrew Stegmann

Call to restore visa-free travel to UK

That’s the gist of a public drive in London, calling for an end to the pesky and costly travel requirement.

The Royal Commonwealth Society – an international educational charity – is two weeks away from launching a campaign to restore visa-free travel for South Africans.

The campaign, which is being supported by the South African Chamber of Commerce, has received the blessing of the Department of Home Affairs, which has itself been lobbying the British government to scrap visa requirements for South Africans.

Up until 2009 South Africans could travel visa-free to the UK, but concerns about fraudulent passports and South Africa being used by al-Qaeda as a transit point to enter Britain saw the British impose the visa system.

Recently New Zealand announced that South Africans would have to apply for visas because of the influx of travellers with fake passports.

Tim Hewish, the Royal Commonwealth Society’s director of policy and research, said: “The matter is for both governments to broker.

“Our goal is to show that the public want a decision sooner rather than later.

“We want to start this grassroots campaign where the 200,000 or so South Africans in the UK can sign up, as well as those South Africans back home who want to visit.”

The campaign will be launched on November 2.

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Andrew Stegmann

South Africa: Contact Centre Improves Access to Home Affairs

Pretoria — Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba has officially launched the department’s contact centre at the department’s head office in Pretoria.

The contact centre replaces the department’s call centre, while offering a multi-platform channel to provide clients with various options to interact with the department. These platforms include email and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) services to better respond to queries in universally acceptable standards.

Members of the public can reach the contact centre on 0800 60 11 90.

Minister Gigaba said the erstwhile call centre could not deal with or address queries from members of the public, hence they launched the contact centre.

“With the contact centre, an operator is able to track the enquiry and be able to tell the client what is happening or at what stage the enquiry is,” he said.

The centre is manned by operators, who have received in-house training to handle enquiries. On average, each operator receives about 120 calls per day. Operators are able to deal with any enquiries relating to applications for IDs, birth certificates and other services offered by the department.

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Andrew Stegmann

Skills Gap Strands South Africa Business as Jobs Go Unfilled

As chief executive officer of South Africa’s First National Bank, Michael Jordaan moved the lender into the tech era by persuading customers to manage their accounts online. One of his biggest challenges was finding enough software developers.

“At the time we had severe shortages in IT, especially for coders in new programming languages like Java,” Jordaan, who’s now a venture capitalist and is investing in training coders at Project CodeX, which he co-founded, said in an interview from Cape Town. “Products like alarm clocks, maps, newspapers, CDs are all becoming apps and it takes coders to produce them.”

A dearth of suitably qualified and experienced staff has left South African businesses struggling to fill thousands of posts even though more than a quarter of the workforce is unemployed. The government’s latest list of scarce skills runs to 25 pages and includes 37 different kinds of trained workers ranging from engineers, architects and software developers to welders, call-center agents and sheep shearers.
Part of the problem lies with a education system that’s had to grapple since apartheid ended more than two decades ago with simultaneously erasing the legacy of poor standards for the black majority and introducing a curriculum focused on cutting-edge technology, math and science.

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