South African courts crippled by IT failure

The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Justice on Constitutional Development has told the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) that its inefficiencies impede the functioning of South African courts.

This comes after the committee’s oversight visit to entities within KwaZulu-Natal’s justice portfolio, where Sita was pointed to as a significant hindrance to the effective functioning of courts.

The committee’s chairperson, Xola Nqola, said this is due to connectivity and infrastructure issues.

“It comes across as if there are delays in what the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DOJ&CD) have been planning to do due to SITA,” Nqola said.

“As far back as last year, we took an official committee decision to call SITA and the department to iron out the challenges.”

Following the oversight visit, the DOJ&CD briefed the committee on the integrated justice system (IJS), the primary objective of which is to enable and integrate end-to-end criminal justice business processes.

These processes include reporting a crime, managing inter-departmental information exchange processes across the criminal justice system, and preventing fraud in the South African Social Security Agency.

According to the DOJ&CD, Sita cannot deliver on IJS projects as the agency is overwhelmed with having to work on and allocate its resources to several other projects simultaneously.

The agency’s supply chain processes were also identified as cumbersome, and its ageing infrastructure as being particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

“Getting the OCJ and high courts online is a short-term goal; it’s low-hanging fruits that you can quickly pick,” said Nqola.

“We need to reach the objectives of the IJS, which state that it must be efficient and effective.”

The Auditor General of South Africa, Tsakani Maluleka, noted in the meeting that Sita has been slow in addressing its recommendations and has received a disclaimer audit opinion.

Sita responded to the briefing by acknowledging its capacity issues, which it attributes to a high vacancy rate.

Similarly, it said that the agency’s instability is due to a previous board that was dissolved, which was challenged in court.

After an interim board was appointed, the previous board was reinstated, and the former board and interim board combined to form a new one.

Sita’s inadequate service delivery

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 progress in digital transformation 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.