The long-term prospects of the government of national unity (GNU) remain a matter of debate, but the earliest revelations have made for exciting reading in the past few weeks.
Some bold moves towards transparency and cost containment in the sports, arts & culture department, for example, have resulted in a lot of new (and bewildered) people recruited to Team Gayton.
Yes, actually delivering infrastructure and public service tends to be a lot harder than poking hindsight holes in poorly managed budgets, but there does seem to be a spirit of vigorous house cleaning in the government right now — and literally everyone but the crafty architects of graft benefit.
I don’t care if you bleed black, green and yellow, red at heart, or blue to the core, surely we can all agree that negligence and malfeasance in public spending has no place in the national project? So even if it feels like grandstanding from the new bosses, I am here for whatever wins it can offer, and there are so many to be had.
Our new communications & digital technologies minister, Solly Malatsi, has an array of wins to choose from, such are the failures of his successive predecessors. On Monday he delivered his maiden budget to parliament and — as he acknowledged — the department’s had “16 ministers (19 if you count acting ministers) and 14 directors-general since 1994”.
SA needs to grab digital with both hands and haul itself into the present, starting with a coherent and comprehensive strategy that will underpin e-services and streamline processes across the public sector.
One epic failure has been the plan(s) to migrate from terrestrial broadcast to digital television. A Digital Broadcasting Advisory Board was appointed in 2001 and a shift to the digital video broadcasting standard was tabled the year after. An actual migration policy only saw daylight in late 2008, and since then we’ve seen more deadlines come and go than communications ministers.
It’s a fiasco of such magnitude that there is almost no hyperbole that feels unfair. Babies born when this plan was first hatched were all old enough to vote in this year’s election. Parables of hares and tortoises notwithstanding, the rollout of set-top boxes may have been quicker if they’d been delivered strapped to the shells of said reptiles.
This isn’t the only digital shift necessary. SA needs to grab digital with both hands and haul itself into the present, starting with a coherent and comprehensive strategy that will underpin e-services and streamline processes across the public sector. This requires management change at the tech and human levels, rather than expensive custom-builds for software and “portals” that too many public servants haven’t the ’puter savvy to use, let alone assess. I want to live in an SA where “paper processes” are more feared than annual audits.
Thank goodness Malatsi is a youthful 39-years old, as he will need Bar One energy for the above, on top of reducing the department’s vacancy rate of 18% and supporting rescue operations for the SA Post Office or SA Broadcasting Corporation.
Perpetually ‘offline’
Speaking of systems ripe for overhauling, one GNU minister has the opportunity to do the unthinkable: home affairs’ perpetually “offline” IT systems have been an evergreen punchline, but new minister Leon Schreiber has promised to embrace tech to change that narrative. Imagine a home affairs system making the most of cloud and artificial intelligence-enabled tools. Imagine a home affairs IT system that is even vaguely reliable.
There are grander plans we could dream, of course. India’s government developed a biometric database to radically improve social services for its billion or so citizens. The Aadhaar database is one of the world’s largest and most ambitious biometric identity programmes, and has facilitated better administration of social subsidies and ID-related processes, including issuing official documents.
A big stumbling block to this kind of aspiration here though, is the apparent lack of cybersecurity sophistication that permeates state organs and related entities. We’ve just been handed a startling example of the failings thereof by GNU public works & infrastructure minister Dean Macpherson.
Last week Macpherson revealed in a media statement that R300m had been lost by the department to cybercrime over the preceding 10 years. Macpherson called the department a “soft target” for cybercriminals, often (it seems) working in cahoots with insiders.
The same advancement in tech that can be harnessed for good has been a boost to nefarious actors. Artificial intelligence is being deployed on the technical side of hacks, as well as the social engineering side. The SA Banking Risk Information Centre estimates that cyber breaches and attacks in SA increased by 22% last year, and ransomware payments in the country were up 20%.
Multiple breaches
The justice department has been hit by multiple breaches, and in 2024 so far the International Trade Administration Commission of SA, Companies & Intellectual Property Commission and the Government Employees Pension Fund all suffered high-profile cyber attacks. If we are to trust the government with sophisticated identifiers (such as iris scans), we’re going to need it to show a little resilience in their custodianship of our ID numbers and BEE certificates. Some have been ringing that warning bells for years.
On this front there is no universal solution. Instead we need better security skills inside the government, better systems throughout, and robust training for all “attack surfaces” that occupy seats and connect to ports or nodes of government networks. Many commentators are looking to AI to swoop in like a caped crusader. The obvious joke here is that any kind of intelligence in the public sector would prove a welcome change, but knowing a few public servants myself I know that to be untrue. We have skills and smarts; we need to optimise the systems to let them shine, and we need firm leadership.
I don’t believe wholesale administration change is key. Those who do are likely to find, as Macpherson said on Tuesday at the Infrastructure Africa Symposium in Cape Town, that “it’s easier being in the opposition” — or outside, in my case.
But this moment of change is an opportunity. Hopefully diversity of party voices in government will deliver the same benefits demographic diversity has provided business, so Team SA can run like Springboks towards a better, digitally enabled tomorrow.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.