Department of Home Affairs announced last week that they will recruit 10,000 unemployed IT graduates to digitise 350million records, some dating as far back as 1895, over a period of 3 years.
Throw away tax money?
In November 2016 the then Home Affairs Minister Gigaba announced the digitisation of 286million records. Seems nothing happened with those records at all. To the contrary they increased since. Not clear how much money was thrown away on this clearly fruitless exercise.
Throw away the time?
350million records / 10,000 people = 350,000 records per person in total
35,000 records per person in total / 3 years = 11 667 records per person per year
11 667 records per person per year / 245 workings days (15 days leave taken into account) = 47 records per person per day
47 records per person per day / 8 hours per day = 6 records per hour
6 records per hour / 60 minutes = 10 minutes per record
You decide on the speed of this process yourself!
Throw away the scanner?
You can attempt this test yourself, but I can simply not get my scanner up to a speed of 10 minutes per document. It remains stuck on 1-2 minutes per document, including naming and saving which of course is a fully automated and pre-programmed exercise in large scale sophisticated document archiving exercises.
Throw away your degree?
Clearly Department of Home Affairs is itself extremely doubtful of the quality of South African higher education. We now need graduates to operate scanner devices. It is simply a shocking statement and a large-scale admission of government what the state and quality of our country’s higher education is.
Throw away the calculator?
Department of Home Affairs says the basic stipend is R4,000 per month for the graduates with larger stipends for supervisors and managers.
I am sticking to the basic sum of R4,000 x 10,000 candidates x 36 months = R1.45billion
The Department indicated the budget is R2.4billion with 10% going for equipment and 90% going for stipends – so R2.16billion for stipends.
So either there is going to be almost as many managers as workers or somebody made a big calculation error or somebody is scoring from the project over and above the capital equipment and the graduates?
Throw away more money?
Digitisation of records is important. But in a country where we suffer huge social challenges, severe unemployment, education challenges, health challenges, security challenges, infrastructure challenges and many more you must ask yourself is this is the best use of R2.4billion.
Throw away the documents?
Anybody who understands robust project management and document management will know that throwing people in numbers at the problem never solved any project, any filing project or any digitisation project. So throwing 10,000 people into this system in my view has a high probability of resulting in “throwing away documents”. I will not be surprised if in 3 years’ time it is even more challenging to get a document from Home Affairs than what it is today.
Throw a peace offering at voters?
So what is this project really – smoke off the mirrors? The government ran out of plans to address unemployment. It also ran out of plans to do anything significant to bolster the country’s economic growth. On top of that support at the polling stations is dwindling. So this is a direct payment to appease voters.
Can I throw the debit and credit?
DR: Marketing expense for the government (disguised as stipends)
CR: Bank
Simple once you figured it out? Accounting never lies!!!
