The Department of Home Affairs has a serious visa backlog

Posted by David Henning on 14 December 2022

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is struggling to clear a backlog of visa applications, which currently stands at more than 56 000 applicants across all categories.

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This backlog of visa applications was made worse by the department’s decision to trial centralising the processing of visas, which it dropped in September.

The DHA seems to issue consecutive blanket extensions to visa applicants, with Business Insider reporting the most recent deadline given was 31 March 2023.

‘Now, it seems that those Home Affairs officials have clear KPIs to adjudicate X number (around 20) applications per day,’ IBN Immigration Solutions said in a public statement, ‘This leads to a very, very high number of rejections. The rejection reasoning in most cases we have seen are wrong.’

In one incident, IBN received  a client’s visa rejection that said; ‘Well, the doctor didn’t pick up the phone, therefore we couldn’t verify the medical certificate.’

Minister of Home Affairs, Aaron Motsoaledi, said in a parliamentary answer that there is no quick fix to clear the visa booking. ‘The department envisages to have cleared the current backlog by June 2024 for all categories of visas,’ Motsoaledi said.

Business Insider further reported that the turnaround time for applicants for a critical skills visa which is supposed to take four weeks takes four to 10 weeks on average with the average response time for a business and general work visa taking eight to 14 weeks.

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