Dear Honourable Minister Schreiber,

I am writing to you in my capacity as the designated Liaison Officer for our church. It is with a sense of deep frustration and profound urgency that I bring to your attention a severe, systemic failure within the Department of Home Affairs’ Marriage Section.

For an extended period, our church has faced an absolute wall of silence from this division. Despite numerous and persistent attempts to make contact via both telephone and email, we receive zero response. The Marriage Section has effectively become entirely unreachable to us.

This total breakdown in communication is causing severe disruptions to our ministry and the congregants we serve. Specifically, we are facing two critical bottlenecks:

• Registration of New Marriage Officers: We have several Reverends who have completed all requirements and are eager to serve their communities, yet they cannot obtain their marriage officer designations.

• Update of Existing Records (Change of Addresses): Many of our current, fully qualified marriage officers have submitted routine address changes. Shockingly, some of these dedicated leaders have been waiting for up to four (4) years for these administrative updates to be processed.

The Impact: As a direct result of these delays, the constitutional and spiritual rights of our congregants are being compromised. Couples looking to marry are facing unnecessary stress, and our clergy are being legally hindered from fulfilling their sacred duties simply due to administrative paralysis.

Minister Schreiber, we are aware of and applaud your stated commitments to modernizing the Department of Home Affairs and tackling deeply entrenched backlogs. However, the current state of the Marriage Section contradicts these goals and reflects a complete lack of basic administrative accountability.

Four years is not an acceptable administrative turnaround time; it is a systemic failure.

We urgently request your intervention to:

• Establish an open, functional, and accountable channel of communication between the Marriage Section and religious bodies.
• Fast-track the pending applications of our Reverends awaiting Marriage Officer status.
• Immediately resolve the years-long backlog regarding our existing officers' address updates.

We request a formal acknowledgment of this letter and a clear timeline for when these matters will be addressed. We are more than willing to meet with a representative from your office or the section head to resolve these outstanding issues swiftly.

Thank you for your urgent attention to this matter. We look forward to your prompt response.

Yours faithfully,
Rev Dr. A.S. Kleingeld