The State IT Agency (Sita) has hit back at the department of home affairs over the latter’s request that its IT procurement procedures be divorced from Sita.
TechCentral reported last week that home affairs had formally applied for a separation from Sita, citing the government agency’s lacklustre performance and the alleged inflated cost of services as a key risk to its IT modernisation efforts.
According to home affairs’ annual performance plan for the 2025/2026 financial year, published last week, its dependency on Sita has led to frequent outages and system downtime, delays in the procurement of IT services, and cost overruns that have impacted its already constrained budget.
In a statement on Tuesday, Sita rebutted this by saying it has submitted multiple proposals to home affairs since 2021 aimed at modernising its IT environment. These, it said, are yet to be implemented, yet home affairs continues to blame Sita for its IT issues.
“It is important to note that DHA (home affairs) consumes only 20% of its ICT services from Sita, and the majority of that spending relates to mandatory services. Apart from procurement delays affecting a small portion of services, Sita has delivered all agreed-upon outcomes and service milestones, many of which were implemented under significant budgetary constraints from the department,” Sita spokesman Tlali Tlali said in the statement.
Key projects
Tlali said Sita has “consistently delivered” on its commitments to home affairs, including “several key projects” and infrastructure overhauls aimed at supporting its modernisation efforts. These include:
- A five-year, R400-million investment to redesign Sita’s core network and replace outdated infrastructure with a software-defined network-ready system across 24 switching centres;
- The addition of redundant core links, procured in 2022 and approved by national treasury, which improved core availability to 99.35% (according to Sita);
- The migration of customer virtual private networks to new infrastructure and the installation of remote environment monitoring systems to prevent downtime at switching centres; and
- Layer-2 services awarded to an industry partner, culminating in the complete migration of Sita’s core network to a resilient 10Gbit/s architecture by October 2024.
Counter to the home affairs argument that Sita’s pricing is inflated, the agency said the opposite is true and that it often delivers projects within strict financial limitations – sometimes even for free.
Read: Home affairs applies for divorce from Sita
“Sita has delivered pro bono services to DHA, including the proposed digital ID solution, aligned with ministerial priorities. Despite several engagements, the department did not formally accept this offer,” said Tlali.
Home affairs also accused Sita of having a poor cybersecurity posture, warning that the risks posed at certain points in its network architecture, such as in the border management system, ultimately compromise national security.
Sita responded by saying it is working all the time on its cybersecurity framework by improving its continuous control procedures and strengthening the capabilities of its security operations centre. Any systemic security gaps that have been identified are being addressed through ongoing assessments and system upgrades, said Tlali.
He said only R7-billion of the R24-billion that government departments spend on IT annually is channelled through Sita. Considering the proportion of spending, Tlali said it is concerning that home affairs leadership has mischaracterised Sita as a “monopoly”, “artificial construct” or “unreliable”.
“Sita has become an all-too-convenient scapegoat for project failures or inefficiencies, even in cases where we had no operational role to play. The department of home affairs is currently consuming core services from Sita at a cost of about R243-million of its R1.2-billion ICT budget allocation,” said Tlali. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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