The Ministry of Home Affairs, Immigration, Safety, and Security has so far received about 90,000 identification document (ID) applications countrywide during the ongoing mass registration for national documents campaign. 

The Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Immigration, Safety, and Security, Lucia Witbooi, revealed this during a consultative meeting with the ||Kharas regional leadership held at Keetmanshoop. 

Deputy Minister Witbooi further revealed that about 40,000 of the 90,000 IDs printed remain uncollected. 

The ministry, she says, exceeded its target of registering at least 50,000 people across the country for national documents, with more than 100,000 served during the campaign. 

Statistics show that 195 newborn child registrations, 188 late child registrations, 761 ID applications, 23 replacements of old South African IDs, and 875 applications for duplicate IDs were recorded in the ||Kharas Region during the ongoing mass registration campaign. 

The mass registration commenced in February this year and ends on Wednesday.

"For this period we have sent out a directive that the regional councillors can come and collect the IDs at the regional office and take them to the constituencies to distribute, and if you don't distribute all, because people have to sign off, you bring back the others if you're not distributing it. That arrangement is also there so that people can have not only the IDs but birth certificates for this process."

Witbooi furthermore expressed concern over the high number of stateless people in the country. 

"We have a lot of them in the country who have been here in the country for many years. I can testify, you can testify as you are sitting, and with this mobile registration, we took their information, their fingerprints, to profile them, and for us to have a database, we profiled them, but not only during this mobile mass registration. Some of them came to our offices some time back to apply for a document."