Home Affairs sheds IT contractors

The Department of Home Affairs has chosen to can the contracts of several part-time IT contractors, in favour of recruiting more full-time employees.

Home Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa confirmed the department's decision to restructure by employing permanent staff. Mamoepa, however, denied rumours that the move has anything to do with government's proposal to regulate or scrap labour broking altogether.

“The department decided to end the contracts of all IT contractors that have been working on projects for less than a year. This is part of cost-cutting measures. The new director-general of Home Affairs decided that part of the process is to recruit more full-time employees.”

Mamoepa adds: “This is not an attack by Home Affairs on the IT contractors, but it is rather a cost-cutting strategy to recruit more full-time IT staff.”

ITWeb has in its possession documents that confirm that certain IT contracts have not been renewed and will be terminated on 30 September. A well-placed source within the Department of Home Affairs claims it will only be terminating contracts that can be replaced with full-time staff.

This follows job advertisements that were published in the country's major newspapers calling for experienced IT staff to apply for at least 22 full-time positions at the department.

“The department is in the process of restructuring and it made business sense for it to employ full-time IT staff, instead of having part-time consultants,” says the source. “This is in order to sustain the current environment.”

According to the source, the Department of Home Affairs has encouraged its IT contractors and consultants to apply for permanent positions within the department.

“It is not sustainable to have 80% of IT resources allocated as contractors to the department, when it should be the other way around. The majority of the workforce capacity needs to be reallocated to work on a full-time basis.”

The source notes that contract work has historically been inconsistent: “The model for the contractors was not sustainable, because we needed people to work on the projects on a longer term basis than the contractors could.”

According to a contractor, who wishes to remain anonymous, IT contractors were notified last week, but were not told of the reason behind the termination of contracts with the department.

The contractor points out that all major Home Affairs systems would be impacted by the decision. He says many of the contractors are now left without work.

In addition, some of the major systems affected by the cancelling of contracts include the population registration system, the passport system and the audit control system.

One of the major concerns is the fact that, should any of the major systems go down, there would not be enough skilled technicians to fix the problem.

“Passport information gets captured into the Home Affairs system through live capture, but interconnection of the application to the mainframe system requires experienced knowledge. If the data is incorrectly captured or if the system should crash, there will be nobody equipped with enough knowledge to fix it,” the source says.

“In my opinion, the department cannot take a risk like this. It will take a minimum of between six months and a year to train new staff to learn how the system works. They are losing experienced staff.”

The Department of Labour is proposing amendments to several Acts, which all fall under the Labour Relations Act. The new amendments would either abolish labour broking, or increase regulation of all temporary employment services.

It has been speculated that the move by the Department of Home Affairs, to terminate temporary contracts, is linked to government's plans to curb labour broking. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) previously threatened mass strikes if labour broking in government departments isn't banned.