Lex Libertas delivers open letter to Minister of Home Affairs opposing digital ID system

PRETORIA – The think tank and advocacy group, Lex Libertas, has today published an open letter to Dr Leon Schreiber, Minister of Home Affairs, calling on the Minister to withdraw the proposed digital identity regulations and to respond publicly to a list of serious concerns raised by the public.

In recent days, thousands of concerned citizens have registered their opposition to the proposal through Lex Libertas social media channels. The open letter warns that, although the system is presented as a voluntary convenience, it would create dangerous centralised surveillance infrastructure that is particularly ill-suited to South Africa’s governance realities.

Dr Ernst Roets, executive director of Lex Libertas, said that the public is being asked to trust a state with an alarming record of system failures, chronic incompetence and low public trust with the most intimate details of their daily lives.

‘International experience shows that these systems rarely remain voluntary and frequently enable function creep and abuse. In the South African context, the risks are unacceptable,’ Roets said.

The letter highlights several serious concerns, including:

• Surveillance Infrastructure: The mandatory logging of every digital ID verification for at least seven years, creating a comprehensive digital trail of citizens’ movements and activities. It amounts to the creation of surveillance infrastructure under the banner of efficiency.
• International Evidence of Failure: Both developing countries (such as India and Kenya) and first-world ‘success stories’ (such as Estonia and Singapore) have experienced major security breaches, exclusion of citizens, and function creep.
• Voluntary in Name, Compulsory in Practice: Systems presented as voluntary rapidly become de facto compulsory for banking, grants, employment and essential services.
• Why South Africa Is Particularly Unsuitable: Chronic government system failures, massive waste on failed IT projects, and South Africa’s status as a low-trust society highlights why a system like this is bound to fail.
• Ideological Risk and Concentration of Power: The dangers of granting broad discretionary powers to the Director-General in a government that has repeatedly expressed admiration for authoritarian centralised regimes.

Lex Libertas urges the Minister to answer a series of detailed public questions about the feasibility, risks and necessity of the proposal, and calls for the regulations to be withdrawn in their current form.

• The full open letter can be read here.

Lex Libertas will continue to mobilise public opposition to this proposal and calls on every member of the public who values freedom and privacy to add their voices.

• The campaign can be supported here.

Lex Libertas is a think tank and advocacy group working towards a viable political dispensation in South Africa, based on the principles of freedom, decentralisation and self-governance.