SA Migration International

News Articles

Real reason Home Affairs systems are always down �` it is getting what it pays for

Source: Mybroadband, 18/06/2021

State Information Technology Agency (SITA) boss Luvuyo Keyise has hit back at the Minister of Home Affairs after the Minister suggested that his department’s ills can all be traced back to SITA.
In a Budget Vote debate at the National Council of Provinces, Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said that the IT system is the “original sin” of Home Affairs.
To resolve their problems, Home Affairs has asked National Treasury to exempt them from having to procure IT services through SITA.
“We have actually identified why [the South African Revenue Service] doesn’t have systems down,” Motsoaledi said.
“It’s because it has been exempted from getting these services through SITA and we are working with Treasury to do that.”
However, Keyise said that Home Affairs’ problems are not SITA’s fault, but due to the department’s own ineptitude and unwillingness to pay for the quality of service it actually needs.
Keyise also explained that SITA does not even directly supply many of the services Home Affairs uses.
“Home Affairs has procured companies through SITA that run and manage its systems,” he said.
It is also not the fault of these companies that Home Affairs’ systems are always offline.
The main problem, Keyise said, is that Home Affairs has decided to buy the cheapest possible IT services that come with the lowest service level agreements.
“They buy a bronze service, which offers a 16 business hours turnaround time on issues,” explained Keyise.
SITA has asked Home Affairs to consider upgrading to a platinum-tier service, which will give them all the redundancy they need and a far more stringent service level agreement.
Keyise said that with a platinum service, problems must be resolved within an hour. However, due to the redundancies the service comes with any outage is usually mitigated within minutes.
With the bronze service Home Affairs insists on buying, many of its offices still run on a single 2Mbps copper-based ADSL connection with a very basic service level agreement.
If the ADSL goes offline, there is no backup in place, and the office can’t function.
While some offices are being upgraded to fibre, they still don’t have any redundancies and a service level agreement not suitable to Home Affairs’ needs.
A platinum-tier service comes with several layers of backups, including microwave and satellite connectivity, so that if anything happens to the main broadband connection the whole Home Affairs office doesn’t grind to a halt.
Keyise said that a bronze-tier service would be fine for some government departments, such as the department of sport, arts, and culture.
For a busy services department like Home Affairs and the police, however, a much higher quality of service is required.
Keyise also said that the Minister was mistaken about the fact that the South African Revenue Service (SARS) received a special exemption from having to procure its IT services through SITA.
“There is no exemption. State-owned enterprises are not covered by the SITA Act,” stated Keyise.
Only national and provincial government departments are required to procure their service through SITA due because of the security and data privacy requirements, he said.
“I can also confirm that SARS is now partnering with SITA in the procurement of IT services,” said Keyise.
He added that SARS has, of its own free will, been buying services from SITA since 2003.
Even if Home Affairs somehow got an exemption from complying with the SITA Act, it will not fix its underlying issues.
“Being removed from SITA Act will not help Home Affairs with the fact that they are procuring a bronze service, or that they do not have capable IT management,” Keyise said.
Another point of contention was the Minister’s statement that Home Affairs held meetings with the CEOs of IT service companies in South Africa at SITA’s headquarters in Centurion.
“That was a meeting we arranged!” Keyise said.
“We said, ‘You seem to not know what you’re doing. Can we help you by arranging this meeting,’” Keyise told MyBroadband.
He also stated that Home Affairs was informed by these same IT services companies that it will need to upgrade its systems.
For years, Home Affairs has not upgraded their systems and the department was advised that it will need to renew its ageing IT infrastructure if it is going to offer reliable services.
“You have what is happening at Eskom where the systems have not been properly maintained,” Keyise said.
Despite all these issues and Home Affairs’ choice to procure the cheapest possible services, Keyise said that SITA has offered to help them for free.
“Where they lack, SITA is there to help them. But it does not mean SITA will say yes to whatever they want,” he said.
According to Keyise, SITA has refused some of Home Affairs’ procurement requests to ensure they stay on the right side of the law.
Keyise said that Home Affairs blaming SITA for all of its problems feels like blackmail for not agreeing to some of the department’s procurement requests.
“The crux of the problem with Home Affairs is they want to get things for free and then blame SITA when it breaks.”
www.samigration.com

Search

Latest News

As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us.... Read more...

EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record?... Read more...

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail. Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

North Korean hackers have been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus to plant backdoors on big corporate networks and deliver cryptocurrency miners through GuptiMiner malware. Researchers describe GuptiMiner as `a highly sophisticated threat` that can perform DNS requests to the attacker`s DNS servers, extract payloads from images, sign its payloads, and perform DLL sideloading. Delivering GuptiMiner via eScan updates In a report released today, cybersecurity company Avast says that the threat actor behind GuptiMiner had an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position to hijack the normal virus definition update package and replace it with a malicious one named ‘updll62.dlz.’... Read more...

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19... Read more...

DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.... Read more...

Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before.... Read more...

Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17... Read more...