The Democratic Alliance (DA) has questioned figures that the presidency has released detailing the number of calls received and resolved by the presidential hotline since it was established.

The department of performance monitoring and evaluation in the presidency says President Jacob Zuma’s complaints hotline has received a total of 72 000 calls since it started.

Spokesperson for the department Harold Maloka said in a statement that the hotline resolves around 4 000 calls a week and has resolved a total of 30 540 complaints since inception. The statistics were released to mark the hotline’s first anniversary.

However, the DA’s parliamentary leader Athol Trollip says the information released by the presidency is a “misleading appraisal of the hotline’s performance.”

He says that these numbers differ significantly from those made public by the president earlier this year.

According to Trollip, the Chief Whip’s oversight committee conducted a tour of the hotline in March. He says the delegates at that meeting were told that at total of 674 864 calls had been made to the hotline. “This figure — confirmed by the president in a reply to a DA parliamentary question in May — is nine times the number of calls reported in today’s statement,” says Trollip.

Trollip has also called the number of resolved calls into question, saying the figures don’t add up. “If these figures are correct, it implies that the hotline has been functional for under eight weeks in the past year,” he says.

Since it was unveiled in September last year, the service has been beset with problems. On its first day, the 11 call centre employees were overwhelmed by the 40 calls/minute. The high call volumes clogged up the lines, leaving many citizens frustrated by the lack of response from the service.

The department for performance monitoring and evaluation says it will conduct an assessment over the project’s first year and find ways of resolving the troubles it currently faces. — Staff reporter, TechCentral

NOTE:

The presidency has clarified the figures it released in its statement on Tuesday.

The hotline has received 72 299 recorded phone calls of which 57 375 are complaints. Around 400 complaints are resolved per week, and not 4 000 stated in the original statement.

The hotline has resolved 30 540 complaints in all.