We learned last week through a reply to a National Council of Provinces question that minister Aaron Motsoaledi and the department of home affairs are trying to get out of using the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) to solve their online and IT problems.
Motsoaledi called the IT system their “original sin”. He said they had moved to a live capture system eight years ago, but were still struggling with the system daily. They are, he said, working with Treasury on this exemption.
I have some sympathy for Motsoaledi. Sita certainly isn’t covering itself in glory. Its own site is marked by Safari and Chrome as “not secure”. The opening line on the "About Us" page is “”. No, that’s not a weird text formatting fail on Business Day’s part, it is the actual opening line — because that’s the kind of attention to detail we get from the technical “experts” who build secure and useable digital interfaces for South Africans and their public servants.
One of Sita’s projects is the eService website. What services can you access on that site? God alone knows. Or maybe whoever wrote the scoping doc does, but I didn’t when I first found myself there. The site has no information on what constitutes eServices in this case (it’s not a fixed term), just a promise of “better classification of eServices” listed under “what’s new” on the front page.
So, dear reader, I attempted registering on that site – for you! – and after two or three user experience cul de sacs, I succeeded. And then I despaired some more. The “dashboard” is 16 slow-loading image-links. Clicking “Business Licenses” sends you to the KwaZulu-Natal department of economic development, tourism and environmental affairs’ system, while “Consumer Complaints” is apparently only for Free Staters and those in KwaZulu-Natal.
Land services directs you to PGLUM, which clicks through to an Mpumalanga co-operative governance and traditional affairs application system. I hope those applying for land use rights know what PGLUM is, because I don’t and Google doesn’t, and the "Help" page doesn’t load.
I knew things were bad, but I am floored by the disconnect between the web I use every day and what government is offering. It’s slow and clunky, with zero thought given to user experience, and it seems to have somehow completely missed the memo that Joe Public doesn’t speak “government” or know the “clusters” of departments. And he shouldn’t have to. How government wants to delineate itself is its call, but you shouldn’t need a qualification in local politics and acronyms to access public services, just as Amazon doesn’t expect a user to be able to code to buy from it.
I’ve seen home industries that are more digitally ready, despite Sita making it the organisation's vision to "Be the lead ICT agency to enable public sector deliver" [sic]. Hell, paying for parking with a SnapScan QR code is light years ahead of where our Sita seems to be, and that’s been running in Cape Town for yonks.
No wonder the department wants a get-of-out-Sita-free card. “Original sin”, however, is magnificent buck-passing on Motsoaledi’s part. The auditor-general made it quite clear how broken a department it is. If finances aren’t your thing, there are countless personal stories that make this point.
I recently interviewed an academic, a bona fide global expert, bringing impressive international experience to a local institution. Or he would if he could have got his work visa in the 15 months since he applied for it. Hell, he can’t even get his passport back from them.
Someone told me if you’re not in the queue by 4am in her region you will not make it into the office that day. Another contact went the digital booking route for passports and ID cards, but the collections queue was longer than the one for biometrics. A family member’s temporary residence permit renewal? Six months, and a four-hour drive to Gqeberha to pick it up. He’s been waiting on a permanent spousal permit since June 2019. An agency I know of is lodging a class action because it has so many clients in this boat. It will be its fourth such action against home affairs.
For those without cash and time, as well as vulnerable asylum seekers and SA's homeless, the situation is so much worse: I don’t think the minister meant writing birth records in physical books when he said “live capture”. Digital transformation is about taking systems online and letting smart tech streamline those processes for you, but it does rest on the assumption that there are some actual systems in the first place.
I don’t expect home affairs to be Estonia, with its online-first public service, but it’s time for a complete and urgent overhaul, losing dead wood, and – God willing – less need to queue at 4am for a replacement ID.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.