A frustrated chairperson of the Standing Committee of Public Accounts (Scopa), Songezo Zibi, has laid down the law for the troubled State Information Technology Agency (Sita).
This was after the interim board, past board and management of the beleaguered SOE huffed and puffed before the portfolio committee all of Wednesday without clear answers.
Committee members took turns grilling the Sita head honchos in an exercise that was akin to trying to make a township slay queen stop drinking Savannah.
What emerged from the engagement was a state entity that is in total disarray, with revelations that in five years it had had as many boards of directors.
Over the same period, the committee heard Sita had been changing managing directors like socks, with six individuals having occupied the hot seat.
Moreover, no one could give satisfactory answers about the company’s messed-up books despite a CFO in the post for five years. His contract ends this year.
Even the Minister of Communication and Digital Technologies, Solly Malatsi, could not save the hopeless Sita management and board from the grilling in their first appearance before Scopa under the seventh administration.
In his summary, Zibi gave Sita a long to-do list on which his committee expected regular updates before they present audit outcomes for the 2025-26 financial year.
“There is a need for a review of Sita. There are several things in that basket. The principles that inform the appointment of board members are important. Is there due consideration for the development curve in which the IT industry is?
“That then informs the diversity of skills and experience that you need on the Board. Is there sufficient rigour to make sure that the people who oversee the entity have the requisite skills to put the management that the institution needs to meet its mandate in place? And then do the monitoring and guidance that is required.
“The second basket we [are] going to have to deal with is past audits and other issues, including the SIU, Public Protector and so on. We are going to need to know where each of those investigations is at over time and whether there is feedback to the institution to make the necessary changes and consequence management, and so on.”
He added that there was a need for stringent vetting of Sita officials as well as regular lifestyle audits.
“My instinct is that Sita staff have significant leverage over the procurement in departments. And there must be a cottage industry of individuals who are queueing to curry favour with Sita officials who can then lean on departments for things to go the right way. It is a universe the committee needs to understand,” said Zibi.
The organisation was also in tatters when it came to setting realistic performance targets, opined the Scopa chair.
As if that were not bad enough, management information systems were in a state of dysfunction and stuck in the old times; so was financial record-keeping and allocations.
“There is an outmoded orientation of the institution; what impact does that have on your performance targets? Are they appropriate? And therefore, is the financial allocation that relates to the performance of those targets appropriate or not?” asked Zibi.
“The first point of performance we are going to have to agree on is that all the milestones that you are supposed to meet for this audit that is coming have been met. That is how we will know that things are going well. If those get missed, it is a problem.
“The final one is the management information systems, which is absolutely critical. It is clear to me that that seems to be, in some instances, at the fax machine stage, a mouse with a cable, all the way to a Bluetooth mouse. It is a mess! What will help the committee is to understand what steps are being taken to clean up that estate and what the timelines are, because, again, that is the accountability dashboard,” he went on.
“We will be interacting with one another periodically so that when we get to the outcomes of next year’s audit, these members have one or two questions each. If not, we are going to have many long and difficult meetings, which is what I am trying to avoid.”
Zibi closed by advising the minister to be harsh in putting pressure on administration in the department to pay close attention to entities within the department, not limited only to Sita but to others such as SABC and the Post Office, among others.
Visit the SW YouTube Channel for our video content.
