Home affairs official admits homeless fall through welfare net

It is almost impossible for homeless people to access state services, said Eastern Cape home affairs provincial manager Gcinile Mabulu.

In an interview, Mabulu said undocumented people, especially those who lived on the streets, faced the hardest struggle to get into the state welfare network.

However, one disturbing problem with trying to identify a homeless person so they could get help was that in their struggle to survive, they physically lost or damaged their fingerprints.

“What happens is that some of them do not bathe for a long time, they warm their hands over open fires, they also smoke [certain substances] which burn their hands and you find that the quality of their fingerprints is compromised because of the damage on their hands,” he said.

When a homeless person died, the quality of their fingerprints deteriorated, causing a backlog at state morgues.    

Turning to the issue of having no documentation, he said: “You cannot do anything. You cannot transact anything without an identity document and it’s even worse when a person dies with no-one around. But having an identity document on one’s person at the time makes it easier to trace that person.”

He was speaking in the wake of a Daily Dispatch investigative series into the quality of life of people on the streets in the paper and online at https://www.dispatchlive.co.za

The series broke with a story about a boy who sits in the traffic at the busy Beacon Bay Retail Park intersection.

Dispatch traced the life of homeless 15-year-old Sihle Ndaweni. One key reason he fell through the net was that he had no birth certificate.

Community activists and social workers were prevented from getting Ndaweni into a shelter or going to school because he did not possess this piece of paper.

“There are benefits associated with a child attending or joining a particular school,” Mabula said. “For instance, there are no-fee schools which also offer nutrition and each nutrition budget is offered in terms of the admission of the child through an identity document or if they are at lower level (under 16), through a birth certificate.

“If a child does not have a birth certificate some schools, even though they are prohibited by the constitution and the Schools Act, do not offer the benefit to the child.”

Undocumented people, despite their nationality, he explained, missed out on accessing simple things like obtaining a driver’s licence and might even find it difficult to be assisted in hospitals due to strict officials.

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