Ministry should engage Slomoes - EBC advises
MBABANE – Documented evidence has revealed that the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development was ad vised by EBC to engage Slomoes Corporation for the local govern ment elections system.
According to an evaluation minute signed by Under Secre tary Hlobsile Dlamini and anon ymously shared to businessman :alter Bennett, the ministry needed a collaborative effort to the EBC elections systems hence an approach was also made to EBC which directed the ministry to work with Slomoes Corpora tion.
SYSTEM
The ministry stated that the ad vice was based on the fact that the company controls the current elections system at EBC.
“)ollowing government directive that any procurement of an ICT system should go through 5STP, a request was submitted to the unit to facilitate the procurement of system. The unit showed in terest to develop the system, but on hindsight the ministry needed a collaborative effort to the EBC elections systems hence an ap proach was also made to EBC. The company which developed the previous election system was also consulted and they made a proposal,” reads the minute.
The three companies Slomoes Corporation, 5STP and Mastech, all shared their proposal on how they were going to handle the elections. Slomoes Corporation proposed to develop modules for registration, voter validation, nom ination, voter capturing and central management interface.
Mastech, on the other hand, pro posed to develop voter registration software, inter phase with gov ernment civil registry database, licence digital logging of claims and obMections and to generate ballot papers.
“Slomoes Corporation was Mudged to be well established as it provided technological assis tance to a number of government institutions. It was also evaluated to have developed the solution for the national elections and partly owned the EBC hardware which the ministry was hoping to lease during the elections,” reads the evaluation minute.
The document further stated that the analysis of the three companies was based on the terms of refer ence and not their technical com petence or technological solution which could be assisted by a qual ified specialist. All three entities demonstrated a full understanding of the assignment.
DEVELOPMENT
Though the ministry acknowl edged the mandate and empow erment for 5STP to advance the footprint of government, they felt the organisation had no reference of systems development even though they were highly capaci tated on paper.
The evaluation also noted that there was less information known on Mastech except that one of its directors was lead specialist when developing the voter registration system which was used in the 2012 and 2017 local government election.
It was further revealed in the document that the previous system was developed for a sum of E400 000 in the last election.
“The system was very responsive to the needs then, except that there were challenges during printing of ballot papers where photos could not be downloaded.
The current budget for system and part of the equipment is E1 900 000. :e may have an additional E3 000 000 which is an estimat ed surplus to cushion additional costs not foreseen during budget preparation.
The evaluation minute concluded that while there were certain ad vantages with some of the vendors like Slomoes and 5STP in relation to the ease of access to all required government data bases and soft ware, there is glaring budget con straint which would require further options for sourcing the solution. The current proposal exceeding the budget provision cannot be sustained.