By Moshoeshoe Monare and Wendy Jasson Da Costa
It has cost a fortune, it has malfunctioned since it started and has caused chaos at licensing centres countrywide - now, motorists will have to fork out R30 for transactions.
This fee was announced on Tuesday by Transport Minister Jeff Radebe at a press conference in which he apologised for the disastrous launch of the multimillion-rand electronic traffic information system (eNaTIS). He threatened to sue if the current technical chaos was not sorted out.
Ironically, the contracting consortium is dominated by a government-owned information technology company.
| Radebe on Tuesday apologised for the problems |
Radebe on Tuesday apologised for the problems and promised that traffic fines related to the malfunctioning of the system would be cancelled.
"Motorists already issued with traffic fines 'due to no fault of their own' will have their fines reviewed on merit and considered for cancellation..." the minister said.
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But, at the same time, the government announced on Tuesday that, as from July, motorists and other users of eNatis will have to fork out a R30 transaction fee, which will help to pay for maintenance of the system.
The Tasima consortium, which won the R408-million contract in 2001, is supposed to hand it over to the department at the end of this month, but the technical glitches that created chaos at vehicle licensing centres might see the contractor working beyond the deadline.
Radebe and transport director-general Mpumi Mpofu made it clear on Tuesday that legal action against Tasima would be the final resort if the system was still malfunctioning when it is handed over to the Road Traffic Management Corporation, a departmental agency.
| Tasima could not be reached for comment |
Tasima could not be reached for comment.
Since the introduction of the system in April it has been characterised by technical glitches, slow systems, long queues, backlogs and the closure of traffic centres.
Radebe assured the public that the problems would be drastically reduced by next week. Special interventions to be introduced over the coming weekend would ensure that they achieved "99,5 percent system availability" by Monday.
He said staff in all provinces would be compelled to work extra hours to reduce the backlog, while troubleshooters would be sent in to assist the provinces until "stability" was reached.
All traffic centres reopened on Tuesday after being closed on Monday to give technicians a chance to address some of the problems.
The department's eNatis project manager, Werner Koekemoer, said they had done several "stress tests" on the system before it was launched, but there were "tens of thousands of scenarios" which could be performed on the database and they were not able to "simulate the real environment 100 percent".
He said part of the challenge was that a billion records accumulated over the past 14 years had to be transferred to the new system.
Radebe said that since its launch, the system had already performed more than four-million transactions, with 50 000 transactions on average per hour compared to 30 000 with the old system.
Some motor industry parties have complained that millions in revenue had been lost as a result of the flawed system and that smaller businesses were on the brink of closure as it had impacted on their cash flow because vehicles could not be registered.
Ministry of transport spokesperson Collen Msibi said yesterday the vehicle registration function problems were caused by "system constraints" because eNaTIS now runs on a single database containing all national data, whereas the old NaTIS was running on 14 smaller databases.
As soon as system stability was reached, promised Msibi, "additional modules" would be introduced to "relieve congestion at service centres and make interaction with our services far more accessible".
- This article was originally published on page 1 of The Star on May 08, 2007
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