/ 5 November 2004

Shaik licence fiasco

Serious questions about the contract to supply South Africa’s controversial credit-card style driver’s licences have emerged from evidence at the Durban High Court trial of Schabir Shaik.

Shaik’s Nkobi group has a one-third share in the Prodiba consortium that was awarded the contract by the Department of Transport in October 1996. The contract is worth about R650-million over 10 years. The Nkobi group’s partners in the contract are Face Technologies, a subsidiary of state-owned Arivia.kom, and Idmatics, a subsidiary of the French defence group Thomson/Thales.

The main security feature of the licence cards is a complex bar code printed on the back. It contains an encoded photograph and other driver information. Traffic officers equipped with portable scanners should be able to check the authenticity of a card by scanning the bar code.

In the absence of scanning devices, the cards would effectively have no advantage over the previous licences that were printed in ID books — compounding public unhappiness about the money, time and hassle spent obtaining the new licences.

Evidence presented at Shaik’s trial confirms that technological problems delayed, seemingly by years, the roll-out to traffic authorities of the scanning devices. This roll-out has now started, but at an unknown cost to taxpayers, after a special scanner had to be developed.

The first 50 scanners were delivered for ”field testing” in November last year. According to the Department of Transport a further 950 devices are currently being distributed to traffic officers in all nine provinces — making this key feature of the project five years late.

Prodiba’s contract was renewed for a further five years earlier this year.

From the start there were rumours of problems with the bar code system adopted by Prodiba and selected in 1996 by the Department of Transport.

In court this week Shaik’s defence tabled a letter from Symbol Technologies, one of the world leaders in scanning technology, which sets out the problems the company had with the driver’s licence bar code.

Symbol Technologies Africa had initially been identified by Prodiba as being the only company that could supply the necessary scanning technology and had spent years consulting with Prodiba over the technical requirements and negotiating with Shaik over a joint venture to supply the scanners.

In the letter, dated May 6 2002, Symbol MD Carlos Ferraz sketched out for Shaik the ”major problems” posed by the technology adopted by Prodiba.

Key among these was the bar code. Ferraz wrote: ”The PDF417 bar code used on the SA Drivers’ Licence card does not meet the prescribed open standards, making the bar code on the card very difficult to scan.”

Ferraz states that a ”shorter” bar code had been adopted than the standard specification in order to fit other printed information on the back of the card. This meant the bar code became ”unreadable, except under controlled scanning conditions”.

Ferraz listed other problems and said: ”We can fine-tune our scanners to improve this situation, but we cannot guarantee an improvement that is acceptable for general use.”

The letter contradicts claims by the Department of Transport that the bar code ”complies with international standards”.

Industry sources, who asked not to be named, say that mobile scanners able to read specification bar codes are widely available, but that the non-standard format adopted by Prodiba necessitated a custom-built solution, without which the system implemented by Department of Transport simply would not work.

Apparent confirmation of this appeared in a press release by Face Technologies in July 2002. Face director George Stander said: ”The Department of Transport required mobile licence card readers for law enforcement officers. After embarking on an unsuccessful fact-finding mission across the world in search of a suitable solution, it became apparent that if the world could not help us, we needed to see if South Africa could create its own solution.”

Face linked up with a little known local company, Sygade Solutions, to develop a mobile scanner that could read the cards. Initially it was projected that they would be available by December 2002, but the first 50 test units were distributed to traffic officers for field-testing only in November 2003.

A demonstration by Face Technologies on 10 M&G employees’ cards this week showed that the scanners now being supplied appear to work.

But the same industry sources said a custom-built solution such as this was generally more expensive and made the country hostage to one supplier.

A Face Technologies spokesperson refused to say what the new scanners cost, saying that was up to the Department of Transport. The department failed to answer questions by the time of going to press.

Sygade MD Gerhard Mynhardt said it was actually ”fortuitous” that Symbol had not provided the scanners. ”We’re involved in a world-class situation now thanks to the withdrawal of Symbol.”

He said Sygade’s product had now ”embarked internationally” to compete with Symbol and the company was now involved in an international bid to supply another government with card readers.

Other evidence at the Shaik trial suggests the Department of Transport bent over backwards to accommodate Prodiba once it became clear that the initial scanner option was not viable.

According to evidence submitted to court by KPMG forensic auditor Johan van der Walt, the Prodiba contract made provision for Prodiba to supply a minimum of 500 scanners at a fixed price.

In February 1999 in a letter to the Prodiba board, Prodiba manager Johan Vorster warned that Prodiba would have to make provision for a loss of R3,3-million on the 500 card readers it was obliged to supply — it had quoted too low during the tender.

The Face Technologies spokesperson this week said that the department had been given ”credit” instead of the original 500 scanners, but he would not say how much credit.

The cancellation of the supply of the 500 scanners was in spite of, according to the KPMG evidence, a ”non-negotiable” condition in the original tender award that the scanners be supplied.

The Face Technology spokesperson said the current batch of scanners was being supplied in terms of the original Prodiba contract.

It is not clear why no tender was issued for the supply of the scanners in spite of the fact that the new devices have higher specifications — and are presumably more expensive — than those of the devices first detailed in the licence tender.