Department Of Home Affairs Bi 30

SITUATION: You go to Home Affairs to get a copy of your marriage certificate and you are told that you need to produce a BI-30 form or DHA-30 form that the marriage officer was supposed to give you as proof of the marriage.
PROBLEM: Marriage Officers were not instructed or obliged to give you a copy of that form before 2013.
BACKGROUND: This requirement of the couple having to produce the BI-30 is a fairly recent one and home affairs is doing it because they don’t want to have to go and search for their copy at the head office in Pretoria (the head office is a huge mess). There was no requirement before 2013 that the marriage officer had to keep a copy or that he had to give a copy to the couple. So how Home Affairs expects them to produce it is beyond me.
There were 2 copies of each page in the old BI-30 books (The BI-30 books were replaced by the DHA-30 books two years ago).
The rule with the BI-30 books was that the marriage officer hands the top copy to home Affairs after the wedding.
Then when he was finished with the whole book, he handed the entire book to Home Affairs.
So the couple was never given a copy of that page.
The new DHA-30 books have 3 copies, and the new rule is that the couple gets given the middle copy.
But this is now a nightmare for people who were marred before 2013/14.
SOLUTION: You can tell Home Affairs that they should have both copies, but I don’t know if it will help.
They are very thick headed. So doing the Affidavits is the only other things you can do.
Please see the template of the affidavit in the next post.
You don’t need to sign again… and yes the affidavits are legally acceptable.
The Director of Home Affairs is obligated according to the marriage act to declare a marriage as valid where he is satisfied that the marriage actually took place.