Earth to Home Affairs

 Dear Home Affairs Management. 

This is a matter of utmost urgency and importance.

Please investigate without delay what is going on in the Northern Cape.

In the town of Postmasburg I visited your offices to try once more to get my hands on that much desired document,  a South African identity document. Having failed four times in Durban,  I was not exactly filled with hope and optimism. 

The first clue that something strange is going on here was the absence of a fierce,  jail warden-type security guard at the entrance. I was puzzled. This was not the Home Affairs that I have come to know and love.

Also absent were the rat-like characters scurrying around, offering places in the queue for a fee, or offering expensive ID photographs. Bigger shocks were yet to come. The offices were clean, orderly and very well signposted. Although I had brought my shaving kit along, I did not need it, as I was inside the building within a very short time.

Of course, in Durban I merely glimpsed the shadowy, mysterious interior from my position in the queue outside. The joy and honour of actually entering were not to be mine on the four occasions that I spent an enjoyable day at your premises.

Service in Postmasburg was efficient, polite and even friendly. In truth, it was real service. The sight of a South African civil servant smiling is rather disconcerting, when one has never seen it before. I thought for a moment that I had said something hilariously wrong. I fully expected Leon Schuster  or someone else  to step up and say:

 "The joke's on you . There's a camera there and another one over there. You didn't really think this was a Home Affairs office, did you? Ha, ha, ha." 

Backslapping and embarrassed grins.

I applied for and received my smart, new identity document in about two weeks. I had spent fewer than two hours in total at the Home Affairs offices. The experience was so unsettling that I had to lie down for two hours after. 

Surely this is not the South African way. I think that you ought to send inspectors to the department here. Surely you cannot allow such a flagrant disregard of organisational culture to flourish. Who knows but that South Africans will be expecting and demanding civil and efficient service from government next. Perhaps even honesty and ethical behaviour. Lord forbid. What kind of society will we have if you folks are deprived of your feudal rights to lord it over the peasants like yours truly? Where will be the grimy, chaotic South Africa that we have come to know and enfold in our hearts?

Please act swiftly. Our very way of life is in peril.

Yours in the struggle to preserve the old ways.

Richard 

Tips for the blogger gratefully accepted 

Capitec Bank, South Africa  

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O Tichmann 

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