IDENTITY CRISIS: Late registration of birth applicants fight for documents 10 months after fire destroyed records

A fire at the Germiston Home Affairs office in August 2025 destroyed paper-based late registration of birth applications, forcing some individuals to restart the years-long process from scratch. The incident has highlighted how systemic inefficiencies and an undigitised filing backlog leaves many South Africans trapped in a cycle of legal invisibility.

In August 2025, a fire at the Germiston Home Affairs office in Gauteng, reportedly started by residents protesting against evictions in the area, caused significant damage to the building. This included the floor where paper files for late registration of birth applications were kept. Ten months later, individuals whose records were destroyed in the blaze are still struggling to get their requests for documentation back on track.

Daily Maverick spoke to two people who lost their late registration of birth applications due to the fire. Both reported that after years-long efforts to secure birth certificates, they were told by Home Affairs officials that they needed to begin the process from scratch because their records had been destroyed.

*Nomvula, a 66-year-old woman living in Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, first submitted late registration of birth applications for two of her nieces at the Germiston Home Affairs in 2023. One of the children, who is now 17 years old, is still without a birth certificate three years later.

Nomvula became the primary caregiver for her two nieces after her sister died during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Her sister did not have an identity document and had not registered the births of any of her seven children.

When Nomvula first submitted late registration of birth applications for the two girls in 2023, with the help of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Children’s Institute, they were 13 and 15. Despite attempts to follow up on the progress of the applications over the next year, it was only in mid-2024 that the Home Affairs office contacted her to bring the children in for interviews to secure documentation.

By that time, the younger child was older than 15, which meant she needed to go through an additional process of providing fingerprints in order to proceed with her late registration of birth application.

In early 2025, the Germiston Home Affairs office issued a birth certificate for the older child, but not the younger, since they were still waiting for feedback from head office about her fingerprints.

However, after the younger child’s application was destroyed in the fire at the Home Affairs office later that year, Nomvula was told that she would need to start the