While pensioners faced a crisis over unpaid grants last week, more than a 100 experts on information and communications technology attended the GovTech 2023 conference in Durban, ironically to look at the “adoption of technologies that can both shape our digital future and drive a new way of work and service delivery improvement”.
More than 600 000 social grant recipients could not buy food and were pushed towards loan sharks to survive after Postbank mismanagement which had led to a failure to pay service providers.
This was sparked by a rushed decision to appoint a new contractor.
On September 5, the day 20 million grant transactions were meant to pay recipients, the system crashed and the new payment system, apparently tested on only 1 000 accounts, could not deal with the load.
The entire board of Postbank resigned last week, after a fallout with Communications Minister Mondli Gungubele. He has absolved himself of blame for the crisis, saying he did not get involved in the operational decisions and that the decision to migrate the bank’s IT systems was taken before he was appointed in March.
The hundreds of thousands who did not receive their grant payments did not want excuses but this is what they received as government departments looked to shift blame elsewhere.
Instead of trying to deal with the crisis, government departments went into a state of paralysis. Experts who could have helped resolve the issue sat at the GovTech conference.
Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande told the conference the country must adopt new technologies and digitalisation to solve simple problems and challenges.
“We must make sure, which is GovTech’s role, that public entities take the lead in the adoption of these modern technologies for efficiency and better delivery of services to the people.
“Modernisation gives us a weapon to fight against corruption.”
Maladministration, inefficiency and perhaps corruption led to the grant crisis and to other government disasters, among them the 2015 Life Esidimeni tragedy in which 144 mental health-care patients died.
Clearly, there are massive gaps in systems meant to ensure checks and balances. Ignoring the warning signs will lead to more suffering and distress for the most vulnerable in society.
Cape Times