You do not write to the President personally. Correspondence goes to The Presidency, which publishes its contacts on thepresidency.gov.za, and the routes below are the official ones. The single most useful number on this page is the Presidential Hotline.
The Presidency contact details
- Presidential Hotline, toll free: 17737
- Email: [email protected]
- Correspondence-related matters: [email protected]
- E-fax for complaints and public enquiries: 086 681 0987
The two seats of the Presidency
- Union Buildings, Pretoria: +27 12 300 5200, fax +27 12 323 8246, Government Avenue, Pretoria
- Tuynhuys, Cape Town: +27 21 464 2100, fax +27 21 462 2836, Plein Street, Cape Town
- Postal address for both: Private Bag X1000, Pretoria 0001, or Private Bag X1000, Cape Town 8000
Which one you use depends on the parliamentary calendar rather than on your subject. The Presidency operates from Cape Town while Parliament is sitting and from Pretoria otherwise, so a letter to the wrong one still arrives, just later. Use the postal address for anything formal and the hotline for anything urgent.
What the Presidential Hotline is actually for
17737 is free to call and exists for complaints and public enquiries about government service delivery. It is a routing service: it takes your complaint, gives you a reference number and refers it to the department or province responsible, then follows up. It is not a decision-maker and it cannot overturn a departmental decision.
Keep the reference number. Without it a follow-up call starts the whole process again, and the reference is the only thing that connects your second call to your first.
Before you use the hotline
- Complain to the department or municipality concerned first, and note the date and the reference they gave you
- Say clearly which department, province or municipality your complaint is about, because that is what determines where it is sent
- Have your identity number and the case, account or reference number of the matter you are complaining about
- Set out what you want done, not only what went wrong
A note on the staff listings
The Presidency contact page also lists individual officials by name with their direct lines and personal work mailboxes, including staff in the private office of the President, the office of the Deputy President and the offices of the Minister and Deputy Minister in the Presidency. Those are not reproduced here. Named-person contacts change with every reshuffle and appointment, and a letter to a stale one is never answered or forwarded. The role addresses above are stable.
What the Presidency does not do
It does not run departments, award tenders, employ people into other departments or hand out grants and bursaries, and it cannot intervene in a court case. Anyone contacting you claiming to represent the President and offering a job, a tender or a payment is committing fraud, and the Presidency does not solicit money from the public under any circumstances. The site also publishes its procurement pages and vacancies openly, which is where those genuinely appear.
For a matter that belongs to a specific department, that department is both the faster and the correct route. The hotline exists for when the department has already failed you.
Related: Pretoria High Court Contact Details · Pretoria Magistrate Court Contact Details · Pretoria North Magistrate Court Contact Details