department of Home Affairs has set a deadline of 31 March 2027 to complete the hosting infrastructure for South Africa's national digital identity system, with the full platform coming online in 2027/2028. This is the first financial year in which citizens will be issued verifiable digital credentials through a secure mobile wallet.
The deadline is set out in the department's annual performance plan for 2026/2027, which has been signed by Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber and presented to parliament on 30 March. The document provides the most detailed public blueprint yet for the project that President Cyril Ramaphosa has placed at the center of the government's digital transformation agenda.
The core infrastructure for the system – the public key infrastructure, a certificate authority, the digital identity platform itself and supporting security controls – will be built within the hosting environment of the South African Revenue Service.
The demonstration plan is the first public document to attach hard completion deadlines and set out the full technical architecture.
The task order to commence procurement of the hosting build is targeted for the first quarter of the new financial year, which began on 1 April, with the full infrastructure to be signed off by the end of the reporting period on 31 March 2027. Operational digital identity – including the issuance of verifiable credentials via a digital wallet – is targeted for 2027/2028, with more agreed credentials added to the wallet the following year.
digital transformation agreement
The decision to anchor the platform inside SARS is based on the Digital Transformation Agreement Signed in April last year Between Home Affairs, SARS, Border Management Authority and government printing operations. Schreiber described the agreement at the time as “historic” and said the ecosystem would leverage the technology potential within SARS to improve public services.
The idea of a single national digital identity was jointly promoted by SARS, the Reserve Bank and the Ministry of Home Affairs. first released publicly By outgoing SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter in late 2024. He argued that the existing patchwork of different identifiers for national IDs, tax, company registration, health care and other services enabled identity arbitrage and grant fraud. Ramaphosa then put digital ID at the center of his 2025 State of the Nation address, along with Home Affairs Promise Producing the first component within 12 months.
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The Home Affairs demonstration plan document describes a digital identity stack that includes a PKI, a certificate authority, an identity platform, digitally verifiable credentials issued by authorized institutions, and a digital wallet secured by biometric authentication, PIN-based access, and cryptographic verification. The hybrid mechanism, including smart ID cards and QR-based credentials, aims to preserve offline authentication where connectivity is limited.
Facial recognition will be the primary biometric method, with fingerprints as a secondary method. Sars hosting environments are specified to provide “high availability and disaster recovery capabilities” and comply with government cybersecurity and data protection standards.
The plan lists three external assumptions that must be in place to meet the hosting goal: timely procurement; Collaboration on integration with the Reserve Bank, banks and telecom partners; and adequate ICT infrastructure capacity to host the PKI solution. No biometric providers have been publicly named, although the Home Affairs document states that a readiness assessment for the hosting environment is expected, as well as commercial agreements with biometric providers.
Legislatively, the Home Ministry is drafting a separate National Identity and Registration Bill to underpin the new system. The Annual Performance Plan confirms that the NIR Bill will be presented to Cabinet during this financial year for approval to be published in the Government Gazette for public comment, with a further submission in 2027/2028 for introduction to Parliament.
other improvements
The digital identity program runs in parallel to other reforms across Home Affairs' digital portfolio, including the electronic travel authorization system, which went live on 29 October 2025; rollout of Smart ID and Passport services through bank branches; And SARS' own Modernization 3.0 program.
The performance plan acknowledges that Home Affairs' cybersecurity maturity “remains low” and marks the absence of a fully implemented disaster recovery strategy as a key weakness. In the medium term, a security operations center is to be set up, in which new positions will be created for a chief director of information security, a director of the security operations centre, a cyber threat analyst and an incident response specialist. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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