President Cyril Ramaphosa will launch the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), a digital visa system, at OR Tambo International Airport on Wednesday, making it the centrepiece of Home Affairs’ technology immigration overhaul. 

The move comes as anger over undocumented migration, porous borders and weak enforcement has fuelled anti-immigration protests, some of which have turned violent and strained relations with countries including Ghana and Nigeria.

“The ETA combines advanced biometric verification, machine learning and the upgraded Electronic Movement Control System (eMCS 2.0) as part of a modern digital immigration ecosystem that strengthens border security while making travel to South Africa faster, simpler and more secure for legitimate travellers,” the Presidency said in an August 6 statement.

The system has already processed more than 203,000 applications since May before it officially launches on Wednesday, according to Leon Schreiber, the Home Affairs Minister, with more than 5,500 fraudulent applications rejected, including fraudulent passports, manipulated documents and other indicators of fraud detected through machine learning.

In his May budget vote, Schreiber said the ETA also allows prospective travellers to apply for a tourist visa from their laptop or smartphone, using biometric and machine learning technology to verify their identity.

The technology starts checking travellers before they reach the border. Schreiber said the system checks 40 parameters to establish whether a passport is authentic and uses liveness detection to compare an applicant’s selfie with their passport photograph. At the border, the Border Management Authority (BMA) uses facial recognition to verify the traveller’s identity and visa.

For aviation, the immediate promise is faster movement through airports. Guy Leitch, a Johannesburg-based aviation analyst, said automated passport control is “long overdue for Africa,” having been used at European ports of entry for years.

But he cautioned that the technology will not solve South Africa’s broader immigration problem.

“I would be reluctant to draw any strong connection between this and it being a solution to immigration problems,” Leitch told TechCabal.

That distinction is important. The ETA is designed for travellers using formal ports of entry; it cannot address people who bypass them entirely.

“They are crossing rivers. They’re crossing through the Kruger National Park. They are wading through rivers,” Leitch said. “All of those things are not going to be affected by this at all.”

He stated that the technology is therefore aimed at making formal border processing more efficient and harder to exploit, rather than sealing every gap along South Africa’s borders.

That comes as immigration enforcement has become a source of growing political tension. In June, March and March, an anti-immigration group called for undocumented foreigners to leave South Africa. Protests spread across the country, with some demonstrations involving violence and looting. The fallout also spilled into regional relations, with Ghana and Nigeria raising concerns about the treatment of their citizens.

The government has sought to distinguish concerns about irregular migration from attacks on foreign nationals. President Ramaphosa has said everyone in South Africa must be in the country legally, while warning citizens against taking immigration enforcement into their own hands.

Ndileka Cola, Head of Communications at Home Affairs, confirmed that the department has been working to put systems in place across the country’s entry points but declined to provide further details before Wednesday’s launch.

“We are excited to be launching the ETA, but we are not giving out that sort of information now because that’s the information that’s going to be delivered at the actual launch,” Cola told TechCabal in an interview on Tuesday.

Home Affairs says the ETA is only the beginning. The department plans to expand it into a single digital visa platform that covers visitor, work and study visas, replacing legacy systems and paper-based processes.

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