Open Letter to Dr Leon Schreiber

10 June 2026

Open Letter to the Minister of Home Affairs

Dr Leon Schreiber

Concerns about the proposed Digital ID System

Dear Minister Schreiber,

Lex Libertas is a think tank and advocacy group committed to the promotion of basic freedoms and the principles of constitutionalism. In this sense, our central aim is to promote decentralisation and self-governance for the various peoples of South Africa. We also take a stand against particular policy ideas that we believe to be counterproductive to the promotion of decentralised governance.

One such issue is the proposed digital ID system.

We have recently submitted our concerns about the proposed digital ID system to your office, and we have opened a channel through which members of the public could express their concerns. Within days, thousands of people have added their names to our submission. Support for our opposition to the digital ID system is still coming in. For this reason, we will add this to the submission that we already presented to your office at a later stage.

This strong public reaction reflects deep and widespread concern about the direction your Department is taking. While the proposal is presented as a technical improvement aimed at greater efficiency and fraud reduction, we believe it represents something far more serious.

We do not believe that the public should be asked to simply trust that this infrastructure will be secure and free of abuse. The design of the system itself — particularly the mandatory logging of verifications and the broad discretionary powers granted to the Director-General — makes abuse not only possible, but likely over time.

In this sense, there are several concerns that we wish to bring under your immediate attention. We will do so one by one. Thereafter, we will conclude with a list of questions with regard to which we would appreciate your answer.

The Creation of Surveillance Infrastructure

At its core, the proposed digital ID system is not merely a convenient authentication tool. It is the construction of centralised surveillance infrastructure. The draft regulations require that all verification queries through the system must be centrally logged and retained for a minimum of seven years. This creates a comprehensive digital trail of citizens’ movements, interactions, and daily activities.

The Department asks the public to believe that this powerful capability will only ever be used for legitimate purposes and that it will never be abused. We do not accept this. Once the technical and legal architecture for mass logging and centralised verification is in place, the temptation for function creep and expanded surveillance will be enormous — especially in a country with South Africa’s governance challenges.

This is not a theoretical risk. It is the predictable consequence of handing the state this level of visibility into the lives of its citizens.

International Evidence of Failure

Experience around the world shows that digital ID systems of this nature rarely deliver on their promises and frequently create serious problems.

In developing countries the results have been particularly poor. India’s Aadhaar system, the largest in the world, was presented as voluntary but rapidly became de facto compulsory for subsidies, banking, mobile connections and other essential services. Millions of citizens, especially the poor and marginalised, were excluded when they could not enrol or authenticate. Kenya’s Huduma Namba and similar efforts in Nigeria have faced major implementation failures, data security issues, exclusion of vulnerable groups, and court challenges.

Even in first-world countries frequently cited as success stories, significant problems have emerged. Singapore’s Singpass has seen a sharp rise in account takeovers and sophisticated phishing attacks. Estonia, long praised as a digital pioneer, suffered a major cryptographic failure in 2017 that compromised hundreds of thousands of ID cards and forced the suspension of the entire system for months. Scandinavian BankID systems have experienced repeated security breaches and SIM-swapping fraud, while raising concerns about excessive corporate control over citizens’ identities. The UAE has been criticised for using its digital infrastructure for extensive surveillance and political control.

These examples demonstrate that even wealthy nations with far better institutional capacity struggle to manage such systems safely.

Voluntary in Name, Compulsory in Practice

The Department insists that the digital ID will remain strictly voluntary. History, however, tells a different story. Digital ID systems presented as optional almost invariably become compulsory in practice.

The clearest and most extensively documented example is India’s Aadhaar system. Despite repeated rulings by the Indian Supreme Court that enrolment must remain voluntary and that it could not be made mandatory for most services, Aadhaar rapidly became a de facto requirement for accessing food subsidies, pensions, bank accounts, mobile SIM cards, school admissions, and numerous other essential services. Millions of poor and marginalised citizens were excluded from basic government support because they could not enrol or authenticate through the system.

A similar pattern is visible elsewhere. In Scandinavian countries, BankID systems — while not always legally mandatory — have become practically indispensable for banking, government services, signing contracts, and everyday transactions. Citizens have little real choice but to participate.

Once the centralised digital identity infrastructure exists, powerful institutional and commercial pressures emerge to expand its use until it becomes unavoidable. It is reasonable to expect that the same dynamic will play out here.

Why South Africa Is Particularly Unsuitable

These international lessons are especially alarming when applied to South Africa. South Africa has a sophisticated private sector in some areas, but our public institutions and governance standards remain characteristic of a developing country.

Government departments are notorious for chronic system failures. Citizens routinely hear the response ‘the system is down’ when attempting to access basic services at Home Affairs, SASSA, even the police, and elsewhere. In January 2024, the entire Department of Home Affairs was taken offline nationwide due to a mainframe failure. The Auditor-General has repeatedly reported billions of rands wasted on IT projects that delivered poor or no results. The same department now seeking to build a far more complex national digital ID system has a long and consistent record of being unable to keep even its existing systems operational.

Compounding this is the reality that South Africa is a low-trust society. International surveys consistently show that only around 16% of people in South Africa believe that most people can be trusted — among the lowest levels in the world. Trust in national government institutions is equally weak, almost always below 40% and often much lower. A system that requires citizens to trust the state with detailed records of their movements and interactions is fundamentally mismatched with social and political reality.

Ideological Risk and Concentration of Power

The risks are further compounded by the ideological orientation of the current government. Senior leaders and ruling party figures have repeatedly expressed admiration for highly centralised authoritarian regimes in China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and elsewhere. These are precisely the kinds of systems that make extensive use (or would like to make use) of digital surveillance and control mechanisms to monitor and manage their populations.

In this context, it is reckless to hand the South African state the technical architecture for mass verification and logging. The draft regulations already concentrate enormous discretionary power in the Director-General of Home Affairs — including the authority to accredit ‘trusted entities’, issue binding technical instructions, authorise data sharing, and suspend digital credentials — with dangerously weak independent oversight.

It should be stressed that when a government department labels an entity as ‘trusted’, that does not make it true, the same way that labelling discriminatory race laws as ‘empowerment’ legislation, or describing North Korea as a ‘democratic republic’ don’t make it true. The fact of the matter is that trust has very little to do with how institutions are labelled by the government, and that public trust is frequently the inverse of government trust.

In light of the above concerns, and in the interest of transparency, we respectfully request that you, as Minister of Home Affairs, provide clear, public answers to the following questions:

1. Given the Department of Home Affairs’ well-documented history of frequent system failures and major IT project collapses, how can you assure the public that this far more complex digital ID system will not suffer the same repeated outages that already prevent citizens from accessing basic services?

2. In a low-trust society where surveys consistently show very low public confidence in government institutions, why should citizens trust this government with a centralised system that logs every verification of their identity and mo

3. How do you respond to the international evidence, particularly from India’s Aadhaar system, that digital ID systems presented as voluntary almost invariably become de facto compulsory for banking, government grants, employment verification and other essential services?

4. What concrete mechanisms will prevent function creep and the expansion of this system into a full surveillance tool, especially given the mandatory logging requirements and the broad discretionary powers granted to the Director-General?

5. Why is the government concentrating such extensive powers over digital identities in one individual (the Director-General) with minimal independent oversight, rather than pursuing more decentralised and citizen-controlled alternatives?

6. How will this system protect vulnerable and poor citizens who do not own smartphones, lack reliable internet access, or struggle with biometric enrolment — and how do you respond to the well-documented exclusion of millions of marginalised people in countries like India when similar systems were implemented?

7. Assuming that you trust yourself with such an immensely powerful system, can you guarantee that other politicians, from more radical parties, who might take over from you in the future should be trusted as well?

8. Given the ruling party’s repeated public admiration for highly centralised authoritarian regimes such as those in China, Cuba and Zimbabwe, how can the public be confident that this infrastructure will not be used for political or social control?

9. Can you guarantee that constitutional language such as ‘public interest’ would not be used to justify abuse of a system like this by politicians more radical than you?

10. If the true goal is merely fraud reduction and service efficiency, why not pursue privacy-preserving, decentralised solutions that do not require building a centralised state-controlled surveillance architecture in the first place?

We urge you to respond to these questions publicly so that South Africans can make an informed assessment of this proposal.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Ernst Roets

Lex Libertas is a South Africa-based think tank and advocacy organization committed to defending constitutional rights, property rights, and the safety of all cultural minorities in South Africa, with a particular focus on farm murders and anti-White discrimination.