Justice Project South Africa was horrified to learn of the emergency evacuation of the SANRAL eTolls nerve centre on Tuesday Afternoon due to an “unidentified white powder” having been discovered in a bag.
The mere fact that a reported 20 employees had to be “decontaminated” and taken to hospital suggests that this incident was a great deal more than a simple prank and we trust that the South African Police Service will do everything in its power to bring the perpetrator/s to justice. We do not believe that SANRAL’s description of this heinous act as “bordering on a serious crime” was nearly strong enough.
Biological/Chemical attacks – real or feigned are an act of cowardice and terrorism and the perpetrator/s should be dealt with in the strongest possible fashion by the Courts when they are tracked down. Hoax or real, JPSA condemns this incident in the strongest possible terms and wishes all SANRAL employees affected by this incident well.
We were however 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, Mr Vusi Mona 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 for.
Howard Dembovsky
National Chairman – Justice Project South Africa (NPC)