eNatis costs double
The cost of the eNatis electronic traffic information system increased from an initial R354m to almost R600m, said Department of Transport director-general Mpumi Mpofu on Wednesday.
However, the bulk of the increase was due to an "expanded mandate", not escalation of the original costs, she told a media briefing at Parliament.
She said the original contract price for the system, which links vehicle and driver records with police, financing and insurance data, was R311m, plus R43m in VAT.
Increases on that amount had been R4.6m because of fluctuating exchange rates, and R51m due to consumer price inflation, which brought the total to R410m – all due to elements beyond the department’s control.
The "expanded mandate" increases, following requests by the provinces, had been R98.3m for software and R44.9m for hardware, and R39m for additional eNatis sites.
This brought the total cost of the system to R594m. The department was satisfied there were no unjustifiable cost overruns.
She said the department was still paying technology consortium Tasima, which won the contract to supply the system, R6m a month for "ongoing work".
Mpofu, who earlier on Wednesday faced Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts, told the briefing there had been "credible progress" in the operation and durability of the system.
"eNatis has stood the test of time in terms of functionality and improved service delivery," she said.
She said the auditor-general had made 105 critical "findings" in his 2006/2007 audit of eNatis, but by the 2007/2008 audit, 96 of these had been fully resolved, and nine partly resolved.
She said before eNatis was launched on April 12 last year, its predecessor, the Natis or national traffic information system, was processing an average of 300 000 transactions a day.
After some teething problems, eNatis’s average had shot up to 600 000 a day, which had been maintained ever since.
"In its first 13 months, an average of 12 million transactions a month was maintained," she said.
She said 99.5% of all queries were processed in one minute.
eNatis would now be transferred from the department to the parastatal Road Traffic Management Corporation in a process that could take up to a year and would be overseen by the State Information Technology Agency.
At the Treasury’s insistence, the department had conducted a risk assessment of the hand-over, and despite being "once bitten, twice shy", was confident the change-over was feasible.
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