Minister of Home Affairs Leon Schreiber says SA’s new elec­tronic travel author­isa­tion (ETA) sys­tem has already pre­ven­ted more than 5 500 trav­el­lers from enter­ing the coun­try after detect­ing fraud­u­lent or sus­pi­cious applic­a­tions.

According to the Daily Dispatch, the gov­ern­ment is pre­paring to expand the digital visa plat­form to more coun­tries. Speak­ing to Newzroom Afrika, Schreiber described the ETA as a ‘game changer’ that will mod­ern­ise SA’s immig­ra­tion sys­tem by repla­cing paper-based visa pro­cesses with bio­met­ric veri­fic­a­tion and auto­mated secur­ity checks.

‘Within the next few weeks, we will be announ­cing the scaleup of this world-class new visa pro­cessing sys­tem, which is going to address not the symp­toms but the sys­temic causes, the root causes of the chal­lenges we have seen over so many years in SA,’ he said.

The depart­ment launched the ETA portal last year, ini­tially tar­get­ing trav­el­lers from China, India, Indone­sia and Mex­ico enter­ing through OR Tambo Inter­na­tional Air­port and Cape Town Inter­na­tional Air­port. Schreiber said the pilot had already demon­strated the tech­no­logy’s effect­ive­ness.

‘We rolled out the ETA, as we call it, in Octo­ber last year for trav­el­lers. Those are basic­ally tour­ists from four coun­tries who need visas to visit SA In that period, we’ve been able to test the sys­tem, which requires you to upload a selfie, upload your pass­port through your mobile device and then we do facial veri­fic­a­tion,’ he said.

He said the sys­tem veri­fies trav­el­lers’ iden­tit­ies against their pass­ports while check­ing dozens of secur­ity mark­ers.

Schreiber said the depart­ment would begin expand­ing the sys­tem to more coun­tries within weeks before even­tu­ally mak­ing it the stand­ard gate­way for all visa applic­ants.

Full Daily Dispatch report