Department of Home Affairs payments through FNB
A South African PSA
The last time I tried to use the Department of Home Affairs e-home site it was utterly broken, and I wound up spending seven hours in Barrack Street under the baking sun (I ended up with heat stroke) waiting to apply in person.
In the months since, they’ve finally upgraded from their Flash site and it can now be used with FireFox as well as Internet Explorer (but not Chrome), and last night we discovered that we needed to make an emergency application for a new passport.
There’s a mostly complete tutorial available here, but it includes an errorneous instruction that blocked us from being able to pay until I contacted FNB this morning (their midnight support was less than helpful).
- Head to http://www.dha.gov.za/ and select Civic Services then APPLY ONLINE — Passport and Smart ID.
- Complete the application forms and generate the payment request. The page will show you the request status, you’ll want to see that the bank has acknowleged the request. You should then receive an email with the payment request details.
- Log in to FNB, head to Payments, then eFiling + Smart IDs and you should find the payment request there. The instructions in the aformentioned guide instruct you to look at Payment Requests, and this is incorrect.
It’s not clear how to get a “receipt” or other proof of payment, so download or print the payment once it’s completed and once the e-home application payment status has been updated save the page (as HTML, complete), then open it in your browser and print it (you should be able to “print” it to PDF).
