Leon Schreiber should be fired: Home Affairs needs an operator, not a marketer

South Africans need reliable service delivery and system uptime, not polished progress posts that collapse the moment “the system is down”.

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Audio summary: https://youtu.be/N7KgN3R1xQ4

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I’ve always wanted South Africa’s new Minister of Home Affairs, Leon Schreiber, to succeed. The department he inherited is notoriously complex, highly politicised, and deeply dependent on national IT systems that seem to fail at the worst possible moments. But at some point, goodwill runs out. My argument is simple: if the reality experienced by ordinary citizens still looks like long waits, repeated visits, and offices paralysed by national system failures, then the person at the top must be held accountable. 

And if that accountability does not translate into consistent service delivery improvement, then the minister should be replaced by someone who is operationally obsessed with fixing the basics, irrespective of which political party they come from.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

This week, my wife and I went to the Home Affairs office at Menlyn Shopping Centre in Pretoria, often described as one of the better-run offices in the country. We did what you are supposed to do: we made a booking, arrived on time, and planned our day around renewing passports and applying for ID cards. We then sat there for hours, only to be told the national Home Affairs system was down. We left without being helped. That is not a “Menlyn problem”. That is a national capability problem.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. An recent Independent Online investigation, Heat, hunger and hope: Inside Home Affairs queues across SA, by Brandon Nel, Simon Majadibodu, Wendy Dondolo and Xolile Mtembu, paints a picture of people stuck for hours across multiple branches, repeatedly hearing that the system is offline or the network is down.

At the same time, political and media narratives are increasingly upbeat. Polity’s piece, Home Affairs wins expected in SONA 2026, reflects the idea that progress is likely to be praised in elite political discourse.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

This is where the tension becomes unavoidable: marketing can coexist with improvement, but marketing cannot substitute for improvement. You can have a reform agenda, a digital vision, and a busy communications calendar, and still fail the daily test that citizens care about most: did I arrive, wait, and leave with the document I need?

Even the state’s own signals reveal ongoing strain. The Department extended operating hours over the festive period, explicitly to help people access IDs and passports during peak demand. Home Affairs extending hours is not inherently bad, but it is also an admission: physical offices are still overloaded, and the system still struggles to absorb demand.

Parliamentary oversight has been blunt about the underlying fragility. A recent Parliament media statement on staff shortages and poor office conditions notes how incapacity translates into poor service delivery, long queues, and burnout risk.

Then there is the politics of “access expansion”. The Democratic Alliance has framed banking-app access for Home Affairs services as a major pro-poor breakthrough. It may well be. But if the underlying national systems remain unstable, the front-end channel does not solve the core problem. It just moves the waiting room.

A final example shows how deeply these system issues ripple into the economy. News24 reports on a legal challenge by telecoms over the sharp increase in ID verification fees, a dispute that sits right at the intersection of national systems, reliability, and the private sector’s dependence on Home Affairs verification services.

IMPLICATIONS

If you accept that Home Affairs is a national operating system for citizenship, then uptime and reliability are not “nice to have”. They are constitutional dignity in practice. For parents registering births, teenagers applying for IDs, and families needing passports, a single day lost in a queue is not a statistic. It is missed work, missed school, and money spent on transport and childcare for nothing.

That is why I believe the minister should be fired if performance is not demonstrably improving at branch level, consistently, month after month. Not because he is a villain, but because the job requires an operator: someone who lives and dies by system uptime, staffing capacity, standardised branch processes, and transparent reporting on failures. I wonder, how often does the minister leave his plush office and visit the branches where real people are experiencing shocking service levels?

South Africa also needs a more grown-up, non-partisan approach to appointments. If a minister cannot deliver predictable service outcomes, the country should be willing to replace them with someone who can, regardless of party affiliation. Competence is not an ideology.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

I don’t doubt that some progress is being made inside Home Affairs. I also don’t doubt that the minister and his team are working in a difficult environment. But citizens do not experience “intentions”; they experience outcomes. When even a flagship office like Menlyn can be brought to a standstill by a national system failure, it tells us the reform story is still fragile. South Africans deserve a department that works on an ordinary weekday, not only in speeches, press releases, and LinkedIn posts. Leadership should be measured by reliability, not narrative, and changed when reliability does not arrive.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net