The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the adjustments announced by the Department of Home Affairs for banks, credit bureau and other financial institutions accessing the National Population Register (NPR).  For more than a decade, the private sector’s fee to access the NPR has not been adjusted from R0.15 per request and has been well below the actual cost for the state to maintain the system, let alone take into account inflationary erosion.  Financial institutions will now be charged R10 per office hour request and R1 per after-hour request.

This decades long de facto subsidy for financial institutions has created a perverse crisis where due to the absurdly low fee charged by the Department, many have simply overloaded the system with requests.  The consequence has been the system’s continuously being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of repeat requests for information and frequently crashing.  This has compounded an already overstretched Home Affairs battling to cope with long queues and the system being repeatedly offline.

The working class has been the victims of this vicious spiral with workers losing out on wages as they queue for days at a time to apply for documents and Home Affairs officials, already battling a crippling 60% vacancy rate, having to manage long queues of frustrated members of the public and systems failures over which they have zero control.

This additional revenue collected from financial institutions will provide badly needed funds enabling the Department to fill critical frontline vacancies and to maintain and modernise its aging infrastructure.  Both will help reduce the long queues at Home Affairs and provide society quality public services.  A reliable NPR is equally critical for other frontline public services needing to access its information with minimal delays.

COSATU will be engaging its affiliates organising workers across the banks, financial institutions and the retail sectors, SASBO and SACCAWU, to ensure that the cost reflective charges put in place by the Department are not used as an excuse by these private sector institutions to increase banking and related fees charged to customers.  These institutions have made sufficient profits over many years and must resist their addiction to pickpocketing workers.  This is a matter that COSATU will be raising with the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and the Banking Association as well.

Issued by COSATU

Matthew Parks (COSATU Parliamentary Coordinator)

Cell: 082 785 0687

Email: matthew@cosatu.org.za