No penalties will be imposed on the Tasima Consortium for the late delivery of the flawed electronic traffic information system (eNaTIS), which plunged the country’s traffic system into chaos, the Department of Transport said on Monday.
Responding to a Parliamentary question posed by the Democratic Alliance (DA), the department said it could not impose any penalties because it felt that the delays were due to, amongst other things, a court interdict obtained by one of the unsuccessful bidders against Tasima.
”This interdict was granted on a temporary basis until it could be heard in court and was dismissed with costs when it was heard in the high court.
”Because of this legal challenge, the project had to be delayed for a period of six months,” the department said.
Somewhere in the middle of the project, it was also discovered that the consortium would have to do more work than previously thought.
”During the execution of the contract, the critical milestone dates had to be revised due to various factors, such as additional functionalities in the software development baseline, additional sites to be deployed, additional work stations and printers to be deployed.
”The contractual change-control mechanism was applied in terms of which both the Department of Transport and the contractor agreed on revised critical milestone dates,” the department said.
However, the DA questioned the rationale behind the department’s flexibility.
”Why did the department accept such significant delays in a more than R400-million contract without so much as a discount on the original cost?” Donald Lee, the party’s spokesperson on transport, asked.
He said Tasima should have been penalised not only for delays, but also for delivering a flawed product.
”Why must the department and the South African public and business continue to pay for this system?” he asked. — Sapa