Government in your pocket

Can digital public infrastructure reconnect people and the state?

Imagine you’ve accepted an invitation to give a keynote at an international conference. The organiser asks for your passport details to book the flight. You dig out the document, only to discover – trigger warning – it expires the month before you leave. Your stomach drops. You know what this means: queues at Home Affairs, hours of idle waiting, a lingering fear that you’ll reach the front desk only to hear it’s too late in the day or – trigger warning – that loadshedding has shut down all systems. (Yes, I still suffer the mental scars from the almost seven hours I stood in line the last time I renewed my passport.)

But now imagine an alternative. You open a government app. It recognises your face. You select ‘renew passport’, review your details, upload a new ID photo and click submit. Within a few minutes, the request is processed. Delivery is promised within two weeks. No queue, no stress.

That is the promise of South Africa’s newly launched Digital Public Infrastructure roadmap.

On Tuesday, Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Solly Malatsi announced a roadmap to modernise government services by building a national platform of interoperable digital systems. It forms part of Operation Vulindlela’s reform agenda and is pitched as a generational leap in state capability. The roadmap’s vision is sweeping: to create a single, trusted interface between citizen and state, supported by secure identity, integrated data, fast payments and seamless digital service delivery.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is the digital equivalent of roads and electricity, core systems that are essential for everyone and that enable activity across the economy. A national identity database allows you to prove who you are. Secure payment rails let money move between people and institutions. Interoperable platforms allow government departments to talk to each other. A central online portal gives you access to services, from registering a business to applying for a grant or renewing a passport.

Government investment in DPI makes sense from an economic perspective. Infrastructure that creates spillovers and network effects is often underprovided by markets and therefore needs public investment. This is especially true of digital systems that reduce costs not only for the state but for households and businesses too. A digital ID, for instance, allows people to prove their identity and access opportunities. It also helps the government ensure that grants and services go to the right people. While the state must lead, there is scope for complementary public-private partnerships, especially in the development of applications and last-mile services. A well-designed core system can enable private firms to build services that expand reach and deepen value.

Just like physical infrastructure, if implemented well, digital public infrastructure can improve service delivery and enhance state capacity. In India, a national biometric identity system, Aadhaar, now underpins nearly every public service. It has reduced leakages in welfare and sped up payments. A similar impact is possible here. In Brazil, the rollout of a state-built payment platform called Pix gave millions of previously unbanked citizens access to digital financial tools. This was made possible by an active central bank that built the infrastructure and mandated inclusion. Within months, over 50 million Brazilians who had never made a digital transaction were using Pix. Such systems can reduce poverty; a study by Suri and Jack found that Kenya’s M-Pesa helped lift 2 per cent of Kenyan households out of poverty, with particularly strong effects for women. Digital ID and payments can also support labour market access, enabling job seekers to register for work or receive wages digitally, and helping informal businesses formalise and access credit.

The potential productivity gains are equally important. By reducing the costs of interaction with the state, filing taxes, applying for licenses and verifying identity, DPI can improve the business climate and encourage entrepreneurship. If citizens no longer need to stand in queues or submit the same information to different departments, time and money are saved. A digital government also creates more reliable data, which supports better policymaking. And a national platform, if made accessible to developers and firms, can support new services and business models, from credit scoring to digital logistics. These second-order effects are harder to quantify but no less real.

But even the best ideas can go wrong.

A recent study by Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar in the Review of Economics and Statistics evaluated what happened when the Indian government introduced biometric ID verification into its food subsidy programme. The goal was to reduce fraud, people claiming rations they were not entitled to. And the new system worked: leakages declined. But so did access. Because of authentication failures, millions of legitimate beneficiaries lost access to food rations, at least temporarily. The costs fell disproportionately on the poor, the elderly and those living in areas with poor connectivity. The study’s sobering conclusion: the introduction of technology improved efficiency but created exclusion. The gains were real, but so were the harms.

The Indian case is a warning: well-meaning reforms can backfire if the broader context is ignored. And it is a warning that resonates here too. As Keith Breckenridge has shown, South Africa has been a biometric state for over a century. The infamous Dompas was a fingerprint-based system of racial control. After 1994, that infrastructure was retooled to distribute social grants, a repurposing that brought inclusion but retained centralised control. Breckenridge calls this the promise and peril of digital government. The same systems that reduce fraud and increase reach can also create surveillance and exclusion. In a context like South Africa, where mistrust in government is high and data breaches are not uncommon, the design of these systems, who owns the data, how consent is handled, what recourse exists when things go wrong, is the difference between inclusion and alienation.

This lesson is echoed across the continent. Kenya’s attempt to build a universal digital ID, Huduma Namba, failed in part because the legal and institutional foundations were weak. The project faced court challenges, privacy concerns and allegations of mismanagement. It was eventually shelved. Nigeria’s ID system, while more successful, still struggles with coverage, especially in remote areas. These examples emphasise the need for strong data governance, public trust and clear institutional mandates. They also show that DPI is not just about apps and servers. It is about the human systems around them: legal protections, service design and dispute resolution.

Sound technology and strong institutions do not necessarily translate into access. The benefits of these new systems will only materialise if people can use them. Even now, with limited digital functionality at Home Affairs, the lines remain long because many people either do not know how to book appointments online or lack the tools to do so. The department is still forced to accommodate those left behind by digitisation. Estonia’s shift to a digital state was not just about technology but also about education. Its Tiger Leap initiative brought computers into schools and improved digital literacy among teachers. The same applies here. As Michael Jordaan observed in an interview published on Our Long Walk, if everyone in South Africa had a smartphone and knew how to use it for banking, queues at bank branches would shrink dramatically. The same holds for public services. A passport app only helps if people know it exists, trust it and have the means and confidence to use it.

The real test of this roadmap will not be whether I can renew my passport more easily. It will be whether it closes the distance between citizens and the state. Whether it allows someone in rural Limpopo to claim a grant without hassle. Whether it makes financial inclusion possible for informal businesses in Khayelitsha. Whether it gives a jobseeker in Gqeberha more than a reference number: a bank account, a recognised identity, a way to participate in the economy on equal terms.

Digital public infrastructure is not a silver bullet, but it is a powerful lever for rebuilding the state from the bottom up. If done right, the dividends will go far beyond shorter queues.

An edited version of this article was published on News24. Support more such writing by signing up for a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v6.