“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. It should be posted at the entrance of the Alberton branch of the department of home affairs.
A single static queue stretches 40m from the doors. The visitor gains access at the head of the queue if they can demonstrate proof of having made an appointment. However, this apparent privilege vanishes inside, where there are several queues, none of their purposes identified and none moving.
Only one fingerprint machine and one camera are working. Then nothing works, because the electricity goes off. It would seem that the dozens of people waiting to order or collect a vital document might as well succumb now and get their death certificates at the same time.
It is even more difficult to get a driver’s licence. The solitary machine that South Africa has to print licences was installed in 1998 and has long been obsolete. It has apparently broken down 160 times.
So when the government announces, as it did this week, that it intends to cut costs and red tape associated with business licensing, one has to ask whether the problem is not overregulation (though it probably is) so much as collapsed infrastructure and bad management wherever the state interacts with its citizens.
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