Qamani’s dream is to one day play for the Bafana Bafanas, South Africa’s national football team. But his coach says he can’t partake in local tournaments because he doesn’t have a birth certificate. The 15-year-old is among over one million children in the country without the document, which prevents them from accessing healthcare, education, employment, and in some cases, social activities.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m not a complete person,” Qamani said. “It feels like I’m not the same as other children.”
Qamani’s mother was 16 when she gave birth to him in the Eastern Cape. The teenage mother did not have her own identification at the time so she could not register her son’s birth, before she abandoned him. It was then up to Qamani's grandmother to raise him in a neighbouring province, the Western Cape.
Grandmother Nozibele Dada and Qamani live in a township in Langa, 10 kilometres from Cape Town in the poverty-stricken Cape Flats. Their tiny shack sleeps eight family members in the same room.
Ms Dada looks tired. She stares blankly at the wall in front of her when asked about the topic of Qamani’s birth certificate. She has been fighting a years-long battle to get her grandson his documents, trying to navigate extensive bureaucratic requirements while at the same time worrying about how to fund their next meal. Ms Dada doesn’t receive any welfare grants from the government to help raise her grandson, as he doesn’t officially exist.
“Every time we call Home Affairs, they tell us they will call us back,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for four years.”
There is a backlog of more than 250,000 people who have been waiting up to seven years for Home Affairs to register their late birth registration applications. The number of people living without birth certificates is much larger, as many never apply, or give up, often due to the rigorous bureaucratic process. For the 12 million South Africans living in extreme poverty, the process is sometimes unaffordable.
“I am scared, because I think: what will happen after I die?” said Ms Dada. “What will happen to my grandchild?”
“We have faith someone will help us,” an optimistic Qamani, sitting next to his grandmother, interjected.
Trapped in legal and social limbo
The Children’s Institute, a research group advocating for children’s rights, is trying to help Qamani by taking the South African government to court over the backlog in late birth registrations. The NGO argues that the backlog is unconstitutional and has included affidavits from 15 affected people in its court papers filed in the Western Cape High Court.
Ms Nosipho Mnyakama is another one of the cases included in the papers. She does not have a birth certificate of her own because she is an orphan and consequentially neither does her 19-year-old daughter. Ms Mnyakama lives in a township in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape but Home Affairs said to lodge her application she must travel more than 1,000 kilometres to her birth province, the Eastern Cape, which she cannot afford to do.
Senior Legal Researcher at the Children’s Institute Paula Proudlock said that Home Affairs is a national agency and that it should be able to communicate internally between provinces, rather than put the onus back on poor South Africans to travel across the country.
“There are over-zealous rules about who can register an orphaned or abandoned child,” she said. “We found that Home Affairs pushes these families away and doesn’t encourage them.”
Proudlock said the rigorous process for late birth registration is “not actually geared for the people that it’s serving” but rather to “help officials avoid a bad performance review”.
“South Africans coming forward are being treated with suspicion that they are an illegal immigrant rather than rightful parents who are assisted to quickly register a child,” she said.
Proudlock said the families the Children's Institute is assisting have been waiting “between two to seven years” and one of the reasons for the bottlenecking of registrations is the interview process, when a panel of five Home Affairs officials, including an immigration officer, interview the family and the child to verify the information they’re giving.
“The interviews are not necessary in all of the cases,” Proudlock said. “The documents in front of an official and the family presenting themselves to that official are sufficient evidence.”
There are roughly 200,000 applicants for late birth registration in South Africa per year, and while the law does not require it, Home Affairs insists on an interview process for every case. Proudlock and the Children’s Institute are calling for the process to be easier to navigate, and that it encourages applicants, rather than pushes them to give up.
Statistics from the 2024 Mid-Year Population Estimates (MYPE) reflected a decrease in the number of births registered, and therefore a decrease in the number of families receiving child support grants (CSG) that they would otherwise be eligible for. This trend is expected to get worse over time.
“It’s the poorest people and the most vulnerable who will suffer the most,” Proudlock said.
Some of those who acquire their birth certificate after a late birth registration are then able to find employment and open bank accounts. Cape Town gardener Bongumusa Bernat was 31 years old when he received his birth certificate. He says “life was hard” before his employer funded his transportation to where he was born in KwaZulu-Natal to satisfy Home Affairs’ application requirements.
“I don’t want this to happen to my children,” he said. “It’s better that it happened to me because my children must not ever experience my situation.”
“You can’t live without these documents – it’s like someone is handcuffing you.”
Bernat was previously unable to afford the trip to his birthplace to lodge his application but also struggled to find work as no one trusted him without an official identification. He even feared he could become a victim of xenophobic attacks that sometimes occur in townships against foreigners.
“I was afraid that someone would attack me, thinking that I'm an illegal migrant,” he said. “People think I’m from another country because my hair is different and I was afraid because I didn’t have proof of being from South Africa.”
Now that he has his birth certificate, Bernat said “life is much better than before”.
“I even have access to a bank,” he said. “I have insurance and I can save some money.”
The predicament of undocumented people is not unique to South Africa, but felt across the continent. There are 540 million people in Africa without an official identification according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
Children are most at risk, with more than half of the continent's children under five lacking a birth certificate.
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