The “system is offline” with no one to blame

The State Information Technology Agency (Sita) has hit back at the Department of Home Affairs (DHA), blaming the agency for its severe system downtime issues and inability to evolve digitally.

Home Affairs minister Leon Schreiber recently criticised Sita for allegedly hindering digital transformation progress across government institutions and getting in the way of the department modernising its services.

Sita is the only organisation that is allowed to procure information technology products and services for nearly all government entities, apart from state-owned companies.

However, in an address to the National Council of Provinces last week, Schreiber said Sita was an “artificial construct that stands squarely in the way of technological progress.”

“Sita currently exercises a monopoly over key aspects of IT services in the public sector,” Schreiber said.

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

Schreiber said that it was not fair to criticise and hold Home Affairs to account for IT failures when they had to be addressed by Sita.

“Even as we move with urgency to reform technological aspects under our control, our efforts will fall short for as long as we cannot maintain, procure and properly manage our own IT infrastructure,” said Schreiber.

Schreiber’s predecessor — Aaron Motsoaledi — had similarly pointed the finger at Sita for the issues in 2022, labelling the system the agency provided as the “original sin” of the department.

However, Sita hit back and explained the reason the DHA was experiencing significant downtime problems was because it had opted for the cheapest package with the lowest service-level agreement (SLA).

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

In feedback following Schreiber’s comments, Sita spokesperson Tlali Tlali revealed the department was still on the Bronze SLA despite the agency recommending a Gold or Platinum product.

Tlali also said Sita had presented a proposal to migrate 133 of the DHA’s sites from copper to fibre Internet with a minimum speed of 10Mbps, but the department said it could not afford this.

He explained that DHA applications such as the biometric movement control system was bandwidth intensive and required a minimum of 4Mbps per workstation.

However, there are still many DHA branches running Diginet links with a maximum speed of about 2Mbps, the maximum supported by the technology.

Tlali also argued that the department’s IT environment was not fully at the mercy of the agency’s performance.

“DHA manages and controls 85% of the ICT Landscape, with Sita only providing the remaining 15% of the services,” Tlali said.

“The 85% that is managed and controlled by DHA covers all DHA applications used to provide services to the public as well as data centre and local infrastructure at all DHA offices.

“DHA has always had full control of its environment to modernise/digitally transform and enable ‘Home Affairs @ Home,'” he said.

Schreiber’s spokesperson, Duwayne Esau, had previously acknowledged that some of the issues were caused by shortcomings in the department’s technical capacity.

Upgrades needed — but at what cost?

Schreiber’s own party — the DA — has previously also pinned the cause of the frequent outages on a lack of backup links and outdated equipment.

The backup link issue is caused by the poor SLA, as pointed out by Sita.

The DA’s Ricardo Mackenzie had also called on Motsoaledi — an ANC member — to account for the quality of IT services provided by the DHA and not to merely pin the blame on Sita.

That raises the question: Why is the department not taking up a higher-end package when Minister Schreiber is in charge and his own party is aware that this is the core problem?

The answer could be that the department’s budget is more complex to navigate than they were willing to acknowledge.

The fact that Sita is the only provider the DHA can use also eliminates the possibility of the department putting out a tender for competitive bids directly from the private sector.

10Mbps is considered a very slow speed in the business broadband landscape but is generally affordable where it is still available.

MyBroadband asked Sita about the costs associated with providing broadband to DHA branches, but Tlali did not mention any numbers.

He only said that the copper infrastructure had various prices, depending on the telco service provider and the branch’s geographic location.

“Telcos have supported modernising this legacy infrastructure due to vandalism and high costs to maintain,” Tlali said.

“We have on many occasions followed up on the proposal to modernise legacy connectivity and will hopefully hear from the DHA soon.”

MyBroadband asked the department and the minister’s spokesperson for more specific details on the problems with Sita’s services, but they had not responded by the time of publication.