DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY: State IT agency faces fork in the road on rehabilitation journey

There was a strange moment on the morning of the second day of GovTech 2026. While the delegates were strolling into the empty auditorium – most were nursing some effects of the gala dinner the night before – the sign language interpreters were having a huddle to agree on consistent phrasing for some of the loftier language introduced the day before.

To them, digital sovereignty is “the authority to control software and data”. “It’s about who gets access to the data,” the group leader told Daily Maverick when asked for clarity.

After a full day of plenary sessions and grand ideas about South Africa’s digital destiny, as well as some good wine to help the contemplation during the awards section of the gala dinner, the sign language simplicity was the best definition of a strange concept.

Because of how the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) had been administered before – six CEOs in seven years and a growing balance in the irregular and wasteful expenditure column – the agency had been incapable of producing a common, shared digital system to handle government department data.

A pick-’n’-mix assortment of technology vendors meant that sovereign civic data was stored across an unknowable number of international servers, which was in breach of Mzansi’s own Protection of Personal Information Act and made the citizenry vulnerable to data leaks – like the print server in the Gauteng provincial administration that keeps coughing up the CVs, ID numbers and addresses of job applicants on the dark web.

Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi has a single vision and measure of success for the future of Sita.

“Ultimately, the measure of success [at Sita] is going to be … the efficiency, reliability and affordability of the services it provides to government departments, and the improved overall ­citizen experience [and] digital experience whenever they interact with the government,” was the ­thesis he shared with Daily Maverick at GovTech in Durban this past week. “That, for me, will be the true determination of whether this board and management is delivering.”

It’s a big change in stance from earlier this year, when he pretty much put the board on a performance management programme with defined deadlines for updates and targets.

But to shatter the cycle of governance lapses once and for all, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies has formally kicked off a structural review to repurpose the agency.

“We’ve initiated a process to look at what Sita should be responsible for within the government in this era we are in, and that is not bogged down by procurement, which then enables all these other nefarious things that have historically been associated with Sita … which is slow, inefficient solutions that are costly.”

Malatsi wants to change the conversation around the agency, moving it away from questions about how expensive or unreliable it was. But he is aware that merely making changes at the top will not be enough to spark this particular revolution: “It needs to filter down effectively.”

Right broom for the room

The job of filtering down the turnaround strategy – as well as setting out the master plan – is on the shoulders of Magatho Mello, the agency’s first permanent managing director in a long while.

“First, we have to start from first principles: why do we exist? The first thing is to reposition our thinking to appreciate that our role is to enable government…”

Mello believes it’s important for Sita to be influential and to own the underlying architecture. “Once the architecture is defined, the custodian of that architecture and the alignment of how government procures and deploys it has to be harmonious … and that’s where Sita has to be the custodian.”

But, of course, the biggest dragon he has to slay before setting out on the path to architecture ownership is the fragmented procurement book. Running ageing legacy systems drains government budgets and stunts technological evolution. However, unlike commercial vendors, Sita cannot simply walk away from its current commitments and existing user base.

“We have to worry about managing the sprawl of platforms and applications, because running legacy systems is becoming a burden both for evolution and also from a cost basis,” Mello explained to Daily Maverick in an oddly frank conversation at GovTech.

“So we have to deliberately assess those legacy platforms that we have to retire and consolidate.”

To accelerate service delivery and lower costs, Mello’s strategy shifts away from custom software coding towards shared, multitenant cloud platforms. “Where I’m hoping to get to is that a government department has a requirement, and we should be in a position to say, ‘We can address 70% of what you require within a short window. The remaining 30% we’ll get to in time…’ I’m looking for us to do a lot less development [and] a lot more customisation.”

Misunderstandings

Mello addressed misunderstandings about Malatsi’s policy framework that allows
client departments to write to the minister when facing procurement delays.

“The minister’s policy is not a bypass mechanism. It is a mechanism that defines a process. By the time a department writes the letter, it’s because they are concerned.

“It is pragmatic what the minister has proposed: a department has been waiting for you, they feel like it’s been too long, and they express their concern in writing.

“They give you the opportunity to say in 10 days whether you’re going to be able to do this or not.”

Mello believes South Africa cannot seek digital sovereignty without first establishing common systems and platform ownership for public data infrastructure, which is why he favours Sita’s custodial role.

That said, he believes foreign entities such as the Estonian government are well within their rights to export their technology products to countries like South Africa, despite it slightly undermining his stated ideals.

Mello believes his biggest job is to restore Sita employees’ confidence after they continued to do their work in the face of constant turmoil at the top. He plans to repay them for their service and then roll out capabilities to enable government to better serve citizens. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R39. The e-edition of DM168 is now free for readers who are signed into their Daily Maverick account. Click on the cover of the newspaper below to access the e-edition.