Home affairs minister Naledi Pandor has targeted 100 000 smart ID cards to be issued by the end of March as the national rollout gathers pace.
The announcement comes as the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) expanded its smart ID card deployment to another 25 offices across all provinces this week, in addition to the three pilot offices opened in October last year.
Pandor says people will be invited to apply according to their month of birth.
DHA spokesperson Lunga Ngqengelele says the rollout has been a bumpy ride over the past few months. "There were hiccups in terms of who was supposed to be invited initially, but the minister has made it clear that it should go according to birth months."
Ngqengelele says the deployment is now in full swing as the department looks to meet Pandor's target. "Something we need to stress is that we were testing the system. We did that to eliminate all problems and this is why we're trying to reach thousands within the coming period to ensure the system functions optimally."
Pandor notes the application process is paperless and biometric technology will record card details.
"Your facial features are laser engraved on the surface of the card and your biometric details are encoded and locked into a contact-less micro-chip," she says.
The DHA has stressed security as paramount to discontinuing the green ID books, which Pandor says have long "been open to fraud and abuse".
She says the smart IDs have "public key infrastructure (PKI) technology as part of the security solution, which will allow users and external entities to trust the authenticity of the card itself".
PKI technology is used for encrypting or signing data, and works by scrambling it in a way that makes it unreadable without authentication. "Crooks will not be able to easily tamper with the card, unlike the present vulnerability of the green ID book," adds Pandor.
Share