Chair of the Sita Board, Mr Jerry Vilikazi, CEO of Sita, Mr Freeman Nomvalo, Ladies and Gentlemen
Arriving here this morning, the Chairperson and I had some concerns about the attendance because we concluded that it was rather unfair to invite this many technical people to listen to speeches when they would rather be at the exhibition where all the gadgetry was on display – it is like trying to drag kids out of a candy store.
I am addressing you this morning at the insistence of the CEO of Sita, Mr Nomvalo, and he admitted last night that the only reason I am here is because the conference required a Luddite who doesn’t understand technology in order to show you how smart you are.
Yours is a distinct privilege, you work at the cutting edge of innovation which means that you work at the cutting edge of the advancement of humankind. I had been associated with the industry and, indeed, Sita in its earlier incarnations for some time. About eighteen years ago, I took responsibility for the Ministry of Finance and through that for, what was then called, Central Computer Services. At that time Sita was housed in the same building as the ministry with green roofs that were the same colour as the big mental asylum near Pretoria. Added to that the nickname for the two institutions were exactly the same. The important point about the Central Computer services was that it had big boxes, it had components called body shops and was responsibility for the management of a little pipe. They didn’t have to manage the internet because it didn’t exist then; there was no email available, except for the US defence force. To understand the rate of progress you can monitor what has transpired in a single organisation and realise the changes that have taken place. When I became Minister of Finance, there were no spreadsheets used in government. In fact, there was this great image, in what was called the Department of State Expenditure, of a cash book that was three metres long and it required people to physically move between one end and the other. When the budget was done, people would use big calculators and they would add the figures horizontally and vertically in an attempt to balance the budget. All of this was managed without email. All of this indicates that technological advances proceed without waiting for people to catch up.
On one level, it is very important to understand progress in the context of Moore’s law. He made the observation 48 years ago that the number of transistors in a circuit would double every two years and since then Moore’s Law has been found to apply. If you take the rate of progress since the dawn of democracy in this country to where we are now, you can work out the maths for yourselves. It is a phenomenal change and the rate of change hasn’t actually slowed down. Moore’s pathway has been spot on and acts as the motivating factor for many here today.
I have been privileged as a Minister and part of this privilege has been shaped by a curiosity that has taken me to various places. I have been able to engage with interesting innovations in various parts of the world. I was very motivated by a fascinating initiative growing out of MIT – one laptop per child. We thought that this might be something that South Africa could implement – one laptop per child at $100 per laptop. This was about a decade ago but it was path-breaking in its approach to IT. I also engaged with a company called WYSE ( before it was taken over by Dell) to try and understand the beginnings of cloud computing. These were mind-blowing innovations. I had been privileged to visit the Google campus and was amazed at the rate of innovation and how these applications find resonance. I was privileged to visit Silicon Valley and I am passionate about the idea of establishing a Silicon Valley type initiative in South Africa. I continue to engage with a group of innovators in Silicon Valley who are South Africans and who are keen to return here but whose companies are incorporated in Delaware on the East Coast of the United States. So while I am here as a Luddite, I am also here as a believer.
I believe in the power of information technology because we have seen the rate of progress. On 1 April 1994, just three weeks before our first democratic elections, we had the first pilots of cell phones in South Africa. It is difficult to describe the capabilities of those phones compared to the smart phones that we have today. If you look at how that shaped investments, at the time that licensing was done for those cellphones, there was the expectation that there would be a maximum penetration level of 30 000 handhelds in South Africa.
We experience and we shape these changes in our lives and sometimes it is quite intrusive but at other times, formidable in the way in which it impacts on our lives.
We must also understand ourselves as a country – the motherboards for those large Ericssons were designed and manufactured right here is South Africa by a state owned company. We’ve lost the technology; we are right off the curve. We need to remind ourselves that the satellite television technology (MTN) was introduced in South Africa as a pioneer country when large parts of the world still used physical cable, and here too, we are now way behind the curve.
Believing in ourselves, believing in our capability and believing in applications in this country becomes an important part of, hopefully, what you will talk about in GovTech 2013. In government itself, about a decade ago we the most amazing IT advisory council to the President and we were able to invite a number of heads of companies, many of these are now sponsoring GovTech 2013, who would join President Mbeki and talk about IT and opportunities in this country. We’ve let that go too. We developed the Meraka Institute to train people and ensure that we had a pipeline of people available to government and to IT so that we did not fall behind. We started about ten years ago with e-government initiative. We were even trained in e-Cabinet systems which were highly protected systems so that we would be able to receive cabinet memoranda electronically and we able to make our input in the same way. We had learnt from some countries that it would be possible to conduct Cabinet meetings and phone-in discussions regardless of where we were in the world because we would be able to build in the firewalls to protect information flow between us. We made a huge commitment to open source development and even on those commitments, we have fallen behind. Part of what I want to ask of you today is why this has happened and what you will do to help us catch up.
There are some positives as well. In my day job I am responsible for Stats SA and I challenged them when we were doing Census 2011 to avoid producing huge paper volumes to present the information about who we are as a nation. We had to innovate and the Stats SA app powered by Roambi has to be the best available source of statistics anywhere in the world. It is updated regularly. The fact that it is able to take the census information down to ward level and provide that kind of information alongside monthly detailed economic datasets, quarterly labour force surveys, mortality stats and every other form of statistics available on a handheld is very exciting. I have looked at statistical agencies elsewhere and they are trying to catch up to where Stats SA is. More recently, we have taken the National Development Plan and made it available on the same driver, Roambiflow. People can look at the Plan in detail and track implementation. These are exciting innovations that use available technology to drive change and put change in the hands of people differently. In the greater scheme of things, I want to suggest that it still is quite minuscule. I start from the premise that information technology is the great leveller but if we aren’t careful about what we want to achieve and we allow for slippage, then it becomes the great divider. The great divider acts like a river during a flood that results in some people being caught adrift and technical people being caught on an island with a huge gap between the two being widened increasingly. That is the challenge that we must engage with and try to change so that the river doesn’t flow between the two groups. If it does, we need to ensure that there is a bridge that everyone can cross continuously.
We are currently in a situation where there are six upstream cables that should allow us to extend our bandwidth capability across the country into rural areas. We must be able to identify every household and ask what the bandwidth capability is and what kind of services people are accessing. This is our challenge. We must close the gap between urban and rural, between rich and poor, between black and white, between men and women. We must respond to that challenge by having targets that we can measure our own performance against. In doing so, we must never allow ourselves again to be delayed by silliness. I remember some years ago, Seacom had to land in South Africa and we had some silly idea that we didn’t want one cable because another cable would be better. So we cut ourselves off until we had a wake-up call from other countries on the continent like Kenya and Rwanda about their applications and their available speed. We then had to take stock to catch up. If you look at internet penetration in South Africa relative to the rest of the African continent, you will realise that we used to lead. Part of the problem is a consciousness about the changes. If you could run the 100 metres at the speed of Jesse Owens 50 years ago and you got into the starting blocks against Usain Bolt now, it gives you an understanding of the type of changes that took place. In information technology it is exactly the same. The rest of the world won’t wait until we are ready. We need to understand this harsh fact and engage with it.
One of the issues in the reality of converged information technology relates to how long we will continue to debate the format of our set top boxes. The rest of the world will not wait for us on issues like this and it is something that GovTech should be addressing. It is something that the Constitution does not give us an option on. The Constitution’s Preamble asks of us that we must ‘raise the quality of life of every citizen and free the potential of each person. It doesn’t provide options about leaving people behind if we haven’t started some of the processes. It asks of us, and we recognise that IT, the great enabler, will be able to help to free the potential of each person. Your responsibility at this GovTech conference and beyond is to understand that and to push the boundaries to enable people through information technology.
I want to challenge GovTech to debate some of these issues and then to respond to us about it. I want to put eight issues on the table for consideration.
The first is e-government – what services; how do we ensure access; how will ensure competent, regular back-office support because it cannot be a flash-in-the-pan process; how will we ensure that the speed of response is always available; and how will we, at the same time, create demand from people who don’t know how to access the information technology.
The second is in education. We have a responsibility to ensure adequate bandwidth availability at every school regardless of where it is geographically located in the country. How will we do that? When will we do that? And how will we be accountable for it? When we have the bandwidth, how will we begin to harvest it for advice? What will it tell us about the systems of inventory management? How will we be able to prevent the calamity that Limpopo province experienced with the delivery of school books? How will we know that the books have been ordered and delivered? How will we know that teachers are in school and in class teaching? How will we know that the school infrastructure is in the state that it is meant to be? How can we use information technology to drive content in education? I know that wealthier schools are using IT differently. They use plato.com for teaching physics and they use numeric.org for mathematics. How do we close the gap? How do we enable young, enthusiastic learners not to wait on recalcitrant teachers but to use IT to drive a different programme in education.
The third is about information documentation. Tomorrow I will be very privileged because I will be collecting my smart card ID. It is a very exciting breakthrough in our country. Where do we have the discourse about what information gets loaded onto the chip and how to construct the firewalls to protect the privacy of individuals? How do you deal with these kinds of issues in a rational and ordered manner?
The fourth challenge relates to healthcare. We have, in the National Development Plan, reflected on the enormous challenges in healthcare. Spending on healthcare reflects that just under 20% of the population have access to medical aid and the amount spent is about the same as on the 80% who are dependent on public health services. How do we begin to change the quality of public health using information technology differently? There are a range of issues related to information systems such as inventory management, dealing with tele-medicines in the current systems and how we drive research and development in health systems. All of these should be part of what the public health system should be engaged with.
The fifth is billing. All I need to say is that I live in Johannesburg but my parliamentary officer had a wonderful experience over the past three weeks. When she tried to renew the licence on her car, she went to the municipality only to be told that her car was stolen a year ago. Unless she stole it from herself, the police somehow picked her car as stolen and changed it on the system. How do we prevent these kinds of things from happening because when they do happen, they turn people off the value of information technology?
Then, there is the issue of general information. We see what the private sector is able to do and how they shape preferences about buying just by picking up on geographic information systems. How do we begin to use this differently? The question that I would like to answer is, what does the next census look like and how do we drive IT smarter? When we look at Brazil we recognise that their level of development is not significantly different to ours, yet they can do their voting electronically. What kinds of innovations do we want in the way in which services are supplied by people who exercise choice in a country like ours.
The seventh is the issue of dignity and rights. I believe that what the Constitution requires of us to do is to ensure that everybody has a visible identity. Ensuring that people IDs and that this can be used in the best possible way is one part of it but the other is having an address. I no longer want to say that my address is c/o McCarthy’s General Dealer in Qoboqobo, village number three. I need to be able to have an address and with available geo-spatial information, we should be able to change this. It is up to us to drive that change.
And lastly, I am also, not only a general believer but a believer in open source and I think that we haven’t begun to tap this well to drink from. In what we do, we should be able to write the code, protect the code and use it differently for government services.
So I plead with you to take those eight issues, debate them, discuss them, sequence them but by all means we’d like to hold you accountable for the decisions you take.
Just before concluding, I want share a quote with this distinguished audience. I have the privilege of serving on the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations and we published a report of the Commission last week, on 16 October 2013. I want to share an excerpt from that report:
New information technology is reaching the world’s poor much faster than food and toilets. A recent UN report suggested six billion people have access to mobile phones, while only 4.5 billion have access to working toilets. There are around one billion mobile phones in both China and India. Africa is home to twice as many mobile phones as the United States and is the most advanced continent when it comes to “mobile money”. Developing countries accounted for 80 percent of new mobile subscriptions in 2011, with the number of Internet users doubling over a four year period. Technology offers great potential to enhance education opportunities, dramatically improve health outcomes, promote free speech and democracy and offer greater access to global markets.
The Internet is the key driver of global connectivity and opportunity, but different bandwidth speeds, limited access, and contrasting levels of openness can mean that the Internet exacerbates rather than offsets inequality. Recent reports indicate, for example, that less than 15 percent of the Indian population (150 million) have access to the Internet, with only three present connected at home. The WTO’s TRIPS Agreement commits developed countries to providing incentives to the private sector for technology transfer to developing countries, but implementation remains weak. Once online, the inequalities persist. Data speeds in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia will reach current North American speeds by 2017. In 2017, those regions will be home to Internet speeds that are roughly six times slower than networks in North America.
We have the capability to change if we know that we want to and that we can change. In conclusion, there is no margin for error. A capable and developmental state has to be a smart state. A smart state is dependent of people like yourselves to give form, content, substance and to keep it engaged and at the cutting edge. Decide and commit to being held accountable for the changes so that it can be measured over the next few years.
I would now like to declare GovTech open and I hope that you have wonderful discussions, take good decisions and emerge from here better informed about capabilities, technology, and all the toys available.
I thank you.
