Few tools have been as seductive as the promise of a universal identification system that the state can at will rely upon to enforce its dictates. While the discourse on “digital ID” is most pronounced now in the United Kingdom, echoes of it have been heard in South Africa under the guise of “modernisation” and efficient service delivery. We should mind our step.
From social grants to border security, digital ID is thought to be a revolutionary step that can grease the wheels of state administration and make life more convenient for everyone.
In reality, of course, it will in time – if not immediately – simply be a Trojan horse for unchecked state power, just like the premises underlying passports and income tax have proved.
Digital IDs will necessarily serve as the foundational building blocks for a surveillance state that might not directly erode freedom but will at least introduce a chilling effect.
And its most insidious feature is that it will – again, like the “temporary” wartime passports and income taxes – very quickly become normalised, entrenched, and interwoven with all state activity. This means that notions of repeal will soon be dismissed as folly.
Home Affairs
The Department of Home Affairs’ 2025-2030 Strategic Plan, presented on 17 June 2025, promises “Home Affairs @ home” – a decentralised electronic delivery of civic, immigration, and other services.
By 2029, a full digital ID system and wallet will emerge, storing up to 15 credentials for supposedly seamless access to grants, healthcare, and more. Complementing this is an Electronic Travel Authorisation system, apparently launched in September, to streamline visas, combat fraud, and boost tourism via automated border controls.
Who can object to any of this, especially given South Africans’ historical problems with service delivery at Home Affairs?
And that is precisely the problem.
This plan’s cunning lies in its near impossibility to oppose in a publicly understandable way. Why would anyone oppose receiving state services quicker and more efficiently, or safeguards against corruption?
But the good-vibes rhetoric cloaks the inevitably coercive nature of what is being proposed. Whatever noble intent starts here – universal enrolment, fraud-proof borders – scope-creep is already a built-in feature.
Scope-creep
What do I mean by this?
The scope of what is “illegal” in South Africa and around the world has ballooned without restraint. In the early 20th century, criminal law was a slender volume, confined to grave, common law crimes like murder, rape, and theft.
Today it sprawls across thousands of pages, criminalising everything from “hate speech” – the United Kingdom is having fun with this in particular nowadays – to, soon, smoking inside your own house in South Africa. Non-compliance with environmentalist dictates will no doubt be the next frontier.
There is no limiting principle in sight. Everything and anything under the sun can be classified as “harmful”, and once this happens – as social democrat John Stuart Mill tells us – the state is entitled to interfere.
Each new statute or regulation piles upon the last, justified by some “crisis” – inequality in South Africa, climate change globally, or even digital exclusion whereby access to data is regarded as a “human right.”
Digital IDs fit seamlessly into this problematic system.
While meant for service delivery now, any future laws will irresistibly take the digital ID as a given part of the state’s enforcement toolkit – just like any new cybercrime law relies implicitly on RICA and other existing methods of state surveillance.
Losing access
Another layer of insidiousness is that punishment under a universal digital ID system need not be penal. The police do not have to knock on your door and arrest you.
Instead, you can simply be excluded from banking, from booking travel or accommodation, or even from formal employment. Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom has been touting this last feature of digital ID quite a bit recently.
The UK government’s “digital ID scheme” presently says the ID will simply “make it easier” to access government and private services. Eventually – necessarily, if the efficiency gain is big enough – this will become mandatory, with the concomitant lack of access per se to private and state services without the ID.
To glimpse the dystopian horizon, we need look no further than China’s social credit system.
What began as an innocuous credit-scoring mechanism – with many convenient perks – has morphed into a panopticon of behavioural control. Citizens’ scores, tied to their national IDs, dictate everything from train tickets to school admissions. Jaywalk? Lose points. Petition the government? Plummet in rank.
Every day the social credit system remains in operation, people adapt their behaviour to it and normalise it, just like South Africans have normalised having to tick their race on all manner of forms for things completely unrelated to racial identity.
Ideological conformity
Today the Home Affairs digital ID it might be used against those people from the Congo our society loves to hate. But tomorrow, with Leon Schreiber no longer minister of anything, it will be weaponised in different, always political ways.
In terms of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Amendment Bill currently being considered, after all, all of South African society will required by law to promote a very strictly defined version of egalitarianism in the civil and commercial spheres.
It defines equality as including “equal right and access to resources, opportunities, benefits, and advantages, de jure and de facto equality, equality in terms of impact and outcomes, and substantive equality.”
(Yes, I am quoting directly from the Bill.)
The Bill then further provides, under the heading of “General responsibility to promote equality,” that, “All persons have a duty and responsibility to eliminate discrimination and promote equality.”
In other words, should this Bill be enacted, if you do anything that denies someone “equal advantage,” or denies them “de facto equality,” or “equal outcomes,” or simply, you do not take steps to advance this kind of equality… the next time you enter your ID to book a flight down to Cape Town you might be greeted with an error.
The state might not enforce it immediately, but with the law on the books it could slap any number of individuals, NGOs, or businesses with consequences for not toeing the ideological line.
Understanding privacy
It would be amusing, if it were not so concerning, that the digital ID imperative is being touted as a privacy boon. Politicians insist that private entities like fraudsters, advertisers, and AI firms are the true villains of our data age, and that digital ID helps to combat them.
But it is the state that remains the paramount threat to privacy, precisely because it wields the lawful monopoly on violence.
There is a remedy against fraudsters: go to the police.
And against private companies. Firms could harvest data for profit, but they compete in a market where consumers can switch, boycott, or litigate. Google or Meta can do no more than annoy us.
It is the state and only the state that can jail us, seize our assets, or bar us from society. And whenever the private sector enforces ideological conformity – around wokeness, for example – or suppresses dissent – like during the lockdowns – it is almost always due to some kind of pressure or incentive from the state.
And we fear private firms having access to our data, but not handing a comprehensive digital dossier on every individual to the state?
We must put a pin not only in proposals like the Equality Amendment Bill or digital ID, but in the very notion that the state is entitled to surveil our comings and goings. And we must do so before the normalisation inevitably sets in.
As liberals, our duty is prophylactic: reject the infrastructure of state control before it calcifies and becomes part of the furniture.
Privacy is not a commodity to be traded for efficiency, but the very foundation of freedom. Like private property, the right to privacy protects the autonomy of the citizen’s independent domain. Without it, the whole notion of a constitutional state – where power is divided between the state and society – collapses.
Messy freedom
This brings us to the heart of the liberal creed: freedom is messy, and tyranny is certain.
Utopians, from Jacobins to Bolsheviks to our own transformationist cadres, dream of a frictionless society, where every variable is optimised by enlightened rulers.
Digital IDs embody this fantasy, promising a seamless weave of citizen and state.
But perfection is often the enemy of liberty.
Free societies are chaotic: people evade taxes (not all heroes wear capes!), dodge regulations, and live off-grid, all often simply because they can.
This messiness fosters moral agency and the diffusion of existential risk.
Tyranny, by contrast, is predictable and absolute.
South Africans have been scarred by decades of authoritarianism. We should be allergic to such certainties.
I was wrong before, in 2020, when I believed South Africans would never again accept a “state of emergency” and hand over virtually absolute authority to a discredited African National Congress regime. I was very wrong. I was disastrously wrong.
The lockdown was not simply accepted, it was embraced, and the state – specifically Cyril Ramaphosa – was praised not merely as “decisive” but as a veritable “father” of the nation who addressed us in “family meetings.”
A world wherein the state cannot track our every move, every moment of every day, would be inefficient – some grants misallocated, some borders porous – but it would in the final analysis be free.
We must grow comfortable with that mess, lest we trade it for the sterile cage of state omniscience.
The Author
Martin van Staden is Head of Policy at the FMF. He sits on the Rule of Law Board of Advisors and the Executive Committee of the Free Market Foundation. He is pursuing a doctorate in law at the University of Pretoria. Visit martinvanstaden.com.
