Uthmaan’s birth certificate

In my previous post, I explained the process of how to apply for a birth certificate for your adopted child. Two years later when Uthmaan arrived, I thought I was a pro at the application process cause I’ve done it before.

Murphy’s law, I was so wrong… at the time that we adopted Uthmaan, he had not received an identity number. All we had was a handwritten birth certificate with his date of birth. This brought on a whole new set of issues.

I applied for his birth certificate as I did with Ebrahim’s, after 12 months I started to follow up on the progress of his birth certificate and received the same excuses as before. Almost like it was scripted. After 14 months, as I told that the department had to create an identity number for him. They did …… and then it was deleted.  Yes, the id number for my son was created and then deleted, so the department had to start it all over again. Which takes 4 months to do, so after the 4 months I start to follow up again. Like before it was a battle to get any information from the department.

18 months after I started the process, we still had no birth certificate, so I did the same thing I did the last time. I emailed the Minister of Home Affairs and cc’d his deputy minister and the head communications. After a month and many follow-ups, I had no response from the minister or his deputy.

Extremely frustrated and after many conversations with the Cape Town Home Affairs, I decided I am going to email the President.  I had no idea where to start or which email address to use, then I found this https://www.gov.za/contact-your-government. It’s the presidential hotline, this hotline can only be used if all attempts to a government department, province, municipality or state agency have been unsuccessful. This was my last resort, as I felt that it was unacceptable that after 19 months, we were nowhere close to having an ID number for my son, without this number it was as he did not exist and our adoption could not be finalized.

In my email to the hotline, I included my previous email chain to the department and all emails I sent to the minister and his deputy.

Within two weeks of sending this email (and a follow-up email to the presidential hotline), I received a phone call from the presidential hotline and an email confirmation that Uthmaan’s birth certificate was ready for collection at Cape Town Home Affairs.

Seems like my perseverance paid off, we had both our boys birth certificates and could finally apply for passports. Which would be easier (I hope) since the online system has been implemented.

As-salaam all.

Ayesha