More South Africans will the opportunity to receive a new South African ID number document as The Department of Home Affairs is expanding its Smart ID services to more bank branches across the country. This is alleviate the pressure on the Department of Home Affairs to some degree.
SOUTH AFRICAN ID NUMBER EXPLAINED
The Smart ID card contains similar information to the current green barcode ID book – most important of which is your ID number.
Besides providing a unique numerical identifier, your South African ID number reveals information about you – such as your date of birth and gender.
The Breakdown of your South African ID number :-
The first six numbers are the birth date of the person in YYMMDD format – so no surprise that my ID number starts 710208.
- The next four are a gender, 5000 and above is male and below 5000 is female. So my ID number would have a number of 5000 or greater.
- The next number is the country ID, 0 is South Africa and 1 is not. My ID number with have 0 here.
- The second last number used to be a racial identifier but now means nothing.
- The last number is a check bit. Which verifies the rest of the number.
So for the ID number 8909025012083 we know certain things about the person:
- Born on September 2nd, 1989
- Male
- 12th male born on that date to get an ID number
- South African citizen
