Home Affairs hopes to drastically shorten queues by expanding its online booking system

Following the launch of its Branch Appointment Booking System (BABS), the Department of Home Affairs is upgrading the service to offer 56 branches. This is up from the 28 it offered before. The extension brings the system to all nine provinces, though there are still plenty of branches left to add.

BABS has already garnered 115,329 users since its debut in June, said Dept. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi. But that was just a trial period. Now that BABS has completed that trial phase, Home Affairs should see an uptick in the number of users.

Find the newly-supported branches nearest you over here.

The System is… online?

Home affairs queue — Long queues at a local Home Affairs

During the trial period, Home Affairs accepted walk-ins and booked appointments, favouring visitors with appointments. Now, Home Affairs will no longer accept walk-ins for Smart IDs and passports (at BABS branches) forcing the use of the online system. This may sound… iffy. But implemented correctly, we could see real change in Home Affairs visits.

A couple of Licence Departments have recently tested a similar system. It gets rid of queues, and the entire process takes less than an hour in total, rather than half a day. If Home Affairs follows suit, this would be a massive change. But only if the online bookings work as intended, which the Traffic Department doesn’t always manage.

“Apart from making sure that there are no queues in the Home Affairs offices where it is implemented, the BABS system will help eradicate corruption by making sure that those who practice the obnoxious behaviour of selling queue spaces have no clients because clients book straight online and come at the appropriate time, and hence they have no need to buy space from anybody in the queue,” the minister said earlier this year.

Banking on making queues shorter

We’re still waiting on the project to allow Smart ID and Passport collection from certain malls to reach completion. That has been underway since May, and little news has been heard since. But waiting for the project to complete isn’t your only hope. There are banks that offer the service, with the Dept. Minister announcing that the number of branches is extending in a big way.

As it stands, only 26 E-Home Affairs branches are available, but with the goal of making bringing that number up to 70. The rollout began on 1 July 2022, so there’s still some waiting before all 70 complete and open their doors. The Department feels that if more people do basic collections elsewhere it could alleviate some of the load on its branches.