On 21 January the South African Roads Agency Limited’s (Sanral) nerve centre in Midrand had to be evacuated when envelopes filled with an unknown white powder, feared to be Anthrax, were discovered.
Justice Project South Africa (JPSA) strongly condemned the incident but has pointed out that it exposed more flaws in the e-tolling system.
In the aftermath of the incident JPSA Chairperson Howard Dembovsky had the following to say.
“We were somewhat surprised that this incident managed to bring Sanral’s much boasted, “technological masterpiece” of e-tolling to a grinding halt, due to the power supply at their nerve centre having been shut down. According to news reports Vusi Mona, spokesperson for Sanral, was quoted as saying that ‘the e-toll system will be affected, since no one is able to man the system, as all staff have been evacuated’.
“This suggests two things – namely that the e-tolls system we had been led to believe was highly automated and infallible is reliant on being manned and secondly, that Sanral has no redundancy built into the e-tolling IT system infrastructure – by having more than one system in place.
“Given the enormous cost of installing and implementing such a system, one would have thought that fundamental corporate IT best practices would have been employed and that Sanral and its tender winners would not have placed all of their eggs in one basket.
“If this is indeed the case, which apparently it is, then government should order an immediate investigation into the competence of both those who drafted and awarded the tenders and those who simply forged ahead and installed such a technologically vulnerable system, for which the public is expected to pay both arms and both legs,” said Dembovsky.
