Citizens will not be charged for their first smart ID cards when the project is finally rolled out.
Department of Home Affairs (DHA) spokesperson Manusha Pillai says the first smart card given to every citizen will be free. However, replacement cards, in the case of loss of the first one, will be “quite” expensive.
The department does not have exact figures yet, but confirms that the prices will be significantly high.
This comes after outrage at the department's increased tariffs in March which means that re-issuing an ID will now cost R140. The reissuing of smart cards is expected to be much higher than this.
The smart ID card will replace the traditional green ID books for South African citizens. The smart cards will have embedded microchips, which can be used to secure state pension payouts. Additional uses are being considered.
Unclear rollout
During her budget vote speech in April, home affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said the pilot project for the smart cards has been rolled out and will continue in this financial year, with the project rollout scheduled for the 2012/13 financial year.
However, Pillai now says nationwide rollout will only occur over the next three years.
At a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee meeting last month, home affairs director-general Mkuseli Apleni said the project needs to have a certain platform in place before it can be rolled out.
He explained that it needs a live capture system and an accurate national population register to avoid duplication and other problems.
“We want to avoid the 'Who Am I Online' (WAIO) problem with the smart card, where there was no business case.” The DG said rushing into the project without proper planning will cost the department dearly.
The WAIO contract was set to replace the department's outdated and obsolete legacy systems, as well as improve security. However, the deal, with tender winner Gijima, was “put on hold” last year after a “dispute”, says National Treasury's Estimates of National Expenditure for the 2011 financial year.
Apleni adds that the DHA wants a project with clear timeframes and costing and deliverables for the smart cards.
Tender puzzle
Pillai says Government Printing Works (GPW) was used to print the smart cards for the pilot project and Apleni said there are considerations to use GPW for the final rollout as well.
“The department fully anticipates that a pilot will be run this year. It has been done on a much smaller scale with the crew member certificates for SAA and is working very well,” says Pillai.
She adds that the intention is to now run a broader pilot project in this financial year.
However, the department is not ready to comment on the details of the project as the technological aspects are still being deliberated.
No tender has as yet gone out for the technological element of the smart cards, although Pillai insists the smart card tender was the same as the WAIO one.
However, Gijima financial director Carlos Ferreira says the WAIO project is separate from the smart card project and the two had different tenders issued by the State IT Agency (SITA) for the DHA.
The WAIO tender number was RFB487/2006 and the smart card tender was RFB643/2008, but the smart card tender was not awarded. It was cancelled due to irregularities in the adjudication process.
Pillai still says that, because it is part of WAIO, the smart card project has been “severely hampered by the Gijima issue”.
On and off
Dlamini-Zuma cancelled the smart card project in March last year, saying her department ran out of money after it used the R114 million allocated for the project “for other things”.
The project was originally supposed to be piloted at the end of 2008, using pensioners as the sample group, but this did not happen.
The contract was sent out for tender, but was not awarded as the entire project was put on hold in 2009. The DHA says this is because of the WAIO delay, since the smart card project needed all the new systems to be in place first before it could be worked on.
Dlamini-Zuma subsequently said scrapping the project tender yielded an unexpected benefit by giving the department time to develop the infrastructure needed to deploy the project.
“Even if the tender had been awarded and we had gone ahead to develop the smart ID card, we would have run into problems with it as the infrastructure still has to be developed.”
The project was also previously cancelled in August 2009, following requests by the DHA to restart the tender process.
Dlamini-Zuma publicly lambasted SITA for the delays to the project, saying the agency didn't “do as it was supposed to do”, with tender irregularities eventually leading to cancellation of the tender.
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