South African IT backbone collapsing in front of everyone’s eyes

The State Information Technology Agency (Sita), established to use technology to enhance the efficiency of state operations, is falling apart when needed most.

Earlier in the year, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced plans to modernise South Africa’s digital infrastructure to enhance government operations.

“As we work to reform the public service and build the capability of the state, we will harness technology to transform the way government works,” he said.

At the time of the President’s speech, government departments would have knocked on Sita’s door for these digital transformation needs.

Established in April 1999, following the promulgation of the Sita Act of 1998, the agency was intended to “consolidate and coordinate” the state’s IT resources.

This saw the merger of CCS, a chief directorate for the Department of State Expenditure, Department of Defence ICT service provider Infoplan, and the South African Police Service’s IT department (SAPS IT).

The Act noted that this was done to save costs, increase delivery capabilities, improve interoperability, and “enhance efficiency at all levels of public service.”

To this end, the legislation mandated that all state departments procure ICT equipment and services from or through the agency.

If a national department needed new laptops or a provincial one required a broadband connection, they had to go through Sita.

That is, until Communications Minister Solly Malatsi gazetted new regulations allowing government departments to sidestep when procuring IT products and services.

The new regulations note that the government department must submit to Sita the user-specific requirements, business case, and deadline for what it needs to procure.

Should Sita not respond, be unable to meet the deadline, or not believe that I can provide as good a price or service as needed, the department in question can procure the equipment or services privately.

Deteriorating service delivery

Malatsi’s amendment of the Sita Act comes after a continuous stream of complaints directed to the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies (DCDT) about the agency’s inefficiencies.

Nonkqubela Jordan-Dyani, the director general of the DCDT, told Parliament in February that several state departments had expressed dissatisfaction with Sita’s level of service delivery.

“You find that it becomes tedious when you are sourcing an iPad, and you have a new staff complement, and then experience delays of three months, sometimes even four to six.”

A few months later, the agency was grilled by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Justice on Constitutional Development for impeding the functioning of South African courts.

The committee said that Sita could not deliver on integrated justice system projects due to being overwhelmed by having to work and allocate resources to several other projects simultaneously.

As of late May, the IT agency’s website noted that it tended to the needs of nearly 250 government departments.

Then, the Department of Home Affairs applied to be exempted from using Sita to procure its ICT equipment and services.

This followed a longstanding disagreement between the two departments, in which the IT agency claims it was the scapegoat for Home Affairs’ failure to realise specific outcomes.

Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber has made it his goal to digitise the department’s systems, with Ramaphosa highlighting the need for a digital identity system in his Sona speech.

However, Schreiber and his predecessor, Aaron Mostsoaledi, have noted their frustrations with relying on Sita’s services to fulfil their department’s mandate and goals.

Schreiber described the agency as an “artificial construct that stands squarely in the way of technological progress”.

Many South Africans may have experienced such frustrations first-hand after waiting in line at a Home Affairs branch only to be told after a few hours that “the system is down.”

After contracting with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to determine the root cause of system downtime, Schreiber told Parliament that his department had “changed service providers.”

“Following the deterioration in the quality of IT systems, emergency interventions were undertaken to protect system environments, ensuring continuity and improvement in service delivery.”

Operational issues

In addition to inefficiencies noticed by state departments, Sita is suspected of having various governance and operational issues.

As a result, in December last year, Malatsi formally requested that the Public Service Commission (PSC) investigate the IT agency for irregular procurement practices and operational inefficiencies.

This followed the Minister joining the Parliamentary Committee on Communications and Digital Technologies for an oversight visit to Sita’s offices in Pretoria.

Malatsi also discovered Sita was outsourcing the procurement of internal transactions and supply chain-related issues to a company called Nakede Management Service.

This was despite employing 72 individuals for this very purpose. Sita has over 3,300 employees in total.