South African IT headache

The South African Information Technology Agency (Sita) is currently tasked with the IT needs of over 250 national, provincial, and municipal departments, which it has shown it cannot adequately do.

Therefore, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies aims to amend the agency’s regulations to allow smaller departments to procure IT services and equipment independently rather than through Sita.

The Sita Act currently mandates that all government departments at the national and provincial levels source IT services and equipment through the agency or from it.

According to the “Sita’s customers” page on the agency’s website, it currently services 80 state entities at the national level and 135 at the provincial level.

These include both national and provincial parastatals.

Sita also services another 48 district municipalities, local authorities, and educational institutions throughout the country.

However, numerous inefficiencies have shown that it cannot deliver its mandated services, requiring the DCDT to intervene.

“We’ve received some feedback from several government departments, and there have been extensive complaints regarding delays in service delivery,” the director general of the DCDT, Nonkqubela Jordan-Dyani, recently told Parliament.

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

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has been particularly vocal, with its current and former ministers locking horns with Sita regarding this issue.

DHA minister Leon Schreiber described the agency as an “artificial construct that stands squarely in the way of technological progress”. He also criticised Sita’s monopoly over IT services in the public sector.

“The model of imposing a state monopoly over digital technologies is simply not fit for purpose in the digital age,” he added.

Schreiber then criticised the agency for hindering the government’s digital transformation progress and modernisation.

However, Sita spokesperson Tlali Tlali said the DHA still had not upgraded its Bronze service-level agreement (SLA).

The Bronze product has a 16-business-hour turnaround time for resolving issues and only supports up to 2Mbps speeds on a copper-based connection.

This is despite the agency recommending a Gold or Platinum-level product. Tlali added Sita had proposed migrating 133 DHA sites from copper to fibre Internet with 10Mbps speeds.

However, the DHA said it couldn’t afford the upgrades.

Schreiber’s predecessor, Aaron Motsoaledi, had a similar run-in with Sita in 2022 over issues at Home Affairs sites.

Sita hit back with a similar explanation it gave in response to Schreiber’s criticism, saying Home Affairs was experiencing downtime because it chose the cheapest packages with the lowest SLA.

To solve these service delivery issues, communications minister Solly Malatsi proposed that South Africa amend the Sita Act to introduce a threshold that departments must meet to be mandated to procure services and equipment.

Malatsi’s predecessor, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, also considered this, suggesting a value of R10 million for the threshold.

However, Jordan-Dyani noted that these regulations cannot be adopted as is because they conflict with the Sita Act.

Therefore, the department must review the Act to ensure harmony with the proposed regulations.

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

As a result, 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 on 11 December 2024.

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.