At a media briefing, cabinet minister Mandisi Mpahlwa assured journalists progress is being made on undersea cables.
WASC, the west-African cable favoured by Trade and Industry, is going swimmingly, and Uhurunet, the Department of Communications' favourite, is happening too. So reports Paul Vecchiatto. He sounds sceptical though.
"Undersea cables still adrift", reads the headline. A senior official is quoted, saying the announcement says "nothing significant". Shareholders in the WASC system are getting impatient, Vecchiatto reports. Negotiations are "becoming increasingly complicated with government's involvement", which is benefiting only private-sector projects such as Seacom, which is nearing completion already.
Perhaps Vecchiatto is just an Afro-pessimist. Maybe he's one of those free-market nutters who believes that government projects are the devil's work. On the other hand, perhaps he's been paying attention. I had the dubious pleasure of reviewing the timeline for the government's keystone IT project recently. A television station wanted to know how the Home Affairs National Identity System (Hanis) is going, since it underpins the entire e-government strategy, including social service delivery, and the imperialist dogs of war in Britain have just insulted South Africa by revoking its visa-free status.
Litany of lies
The timeline would be funny, if it wasn't so serious. The project was first announced in 1995, and approved by cabinet in 1996. The first contract was awarded to a consortium in 1999. Back-end systems went live in 2002, and we're told that the original idea for bar-coded ID cards has been scrapped, in favour of smart cards.
In 2003, director-general Barry Gilder said he was working to fix the "precarious" position of the department, and launched " Hanis Reloaded". Great fanfare ensued, and analysts predicted an imminent smart card explosion, mostly driven by smart ID cards.
By 2005, it was all systems go, according to news headlines, and everything was on track for smart ID cards and electronic passports by 2007. In 2006, the projects were "in an advanced state of nearing completion". Whatever that means.
Come 2007, and Mavuso Msimang took over as director-general. He called the department a disgrace, and washed his hands of anything it ever said about smart ID cards. Last year, Britain raised concerns about South African passports, but we were told the only problem was that our passports are a target for criminals because they're among the safest and most secure in the world, and in any case, our new systems will permit electronic, biometric passports that will solve the problem that they're neither safe nor secure. Billions more are spent, because Hanis only exists in a lab at the department's Pretoria headquarters, and it needs to be completely redesigned anyway.
Hanis revolutions
Next week, at ITWeb's eGovernment Conference, Msimang will present a case study on Hanis, to illustrate "progress towards an effective e-service delivery framework". I don't envy Msimang his job, and have great respect for him, but this should be a laugh a minute.
For over a decade, the government has been flatly lying, time and again, about Hanis, smart ID cards, and electronic passports.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
For over a decade, the government has been flatly lying, time and again, about Hanis, smart ID cards, and electronic passports. Maybe Vecchiatto is not inclined to take them at their word about cables either. Take another example. By 2007, it was clear that government's policies had failed to do anything about the high cost of telecommunications. So the President's International Advisory Committee (PIAC) decided to quit calling attention to it, and made e-skills its top priority that year.
Several companies came to the table, including Oracle, which offered to invest in a Technology School of Leadership. The IDC offered to fund the Makeda Consortium, the black-empowerment partner. By the time it opened, the ambitious name had already bitten the dust, and it was called simply the e-Skills Academy. Former president Thabo Mbeki personally opened the centre in March last year, with beautiful words about shared determination and inspiring partnership.
Sadly, the Makeda directors felt that sharing and partnership didn't go as far as taking responsibility for the loan, and they pulled out. Less than a year after its launch, the e-Skills Academy went into liquidation. The only true thing we were ever told about the e-Skills Academy was that it wasn't "about the pedantics of higher level thinking skills".
Perhaps Vecchiatto saw what happens to grand government schemes to cobble together empowerment consortia and public-private partnerships to deliver projects for the public good. As I have noted before, Seacom's investors have also been paying attention, or they wouldn't be investing billions of rands to compete with three undersea cables that all involve governments.
Sadly, I can end this column just like I ended the last one: It would be surprising if our politicians are prepared to admit their party got it so wrong for so long. How do you explain to a policy-maker that the best policy is as little policy as possible?
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