Digital ID Warrants Critical Appraisal
Promotion of ideas and policies by sources regarded as reputable invariably expedites acceptance. Minister of Home Affairs Leon Schreiber’s promotion of digital ID is a case in point that warrants critical appraisal.
Understandably upbeat about modernizing a critical government service, Dr Schreiber ticks off the advantages of digital ID: curbing ID fraud and corruption, reducing administrative bottlenecks, user convenience as a centralized store of birth and marriage certificates, and enabling safe authentication for visa travel – all accessible on your smartphone.
However, there is a downside or a dark side to digital ID. Smartphones are vulnerable to hacking and cyber-attacks on internet servers, politely called glitches, which may result in data breaches. In such circumstances, one might have no means of proving ID.
Nonetheless, the Minister is aware of those possibilities and comfortingly states that having a digital ID is purely optional. One’s smart card ID will remain valid. In any case, a digital credential will have only a five-year validity period before it needs to be refreshed.
What Dr Schreiber does not state is that the digital ID portal is an extension of control by the government. Eventually, in time, the objective is to make digital ID mandatory. What Dr Schreiber does not point out is that digital ID enables the government to track significant aspects of one’s life – travel, shopping, health. As such, it is an encroachment on civil liberties because it breaches privacy and enables the government to place one under surveillance.
History shows that the aim of unchallenged governments is to consolidate their power and control over populations. To entrust the irresponsible, unaccountable ANC government with trust in not abusing the digital ID system for its nefarious political ends, is not a smart idea. The recent Afrobarometer findings show that the public trust deficit in government is in excess of 70%.
It has also always been obvious that the aim of the ANC, MK, and EFF is to realize all the policies of the Marxist Freedom Charter, which is why they favour China’s undemocratic, authoritarian population control. Digital ID enables censorship of opposition to a prescribed narrative and the entrenchment of power. Moreover, centralisation has long been recognised as the key lever in the imposition of Marxist tyranny.
The smartphone is undoubtedly an indispensable device in the 21st century. But it is already serving as a means of violating freedoms. The EU has passed Chat control legislation, which empowers platforms to scan private messages and red-flag ones that challenge or oppose official narratives. Such violations can result in steep fines. As such, the Orwellian reality of Big Brother and Newspeak is already bearing down on Europe.
Notwithstanding Dr Schreiber’s good intentions, the following excerpt from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 3, line 123) is most pertinent regarding truth and trust: “Oftentimes, to win us to our own harm, the instruments of darkness tell truths, win us with honest trifles to betray us in deepest consequence.”
