The chairperson (or former chairperson now) at Africom -Mr Jacob Wekwete- is now the head of Zimbabwe’s E-Government Unit in the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC). He has left his post at Africom and will take charge of the E-Government program which runs across a number of public sector institutions.
What exactly is this e-Gov project?
It’s great that there’s a unit with a seemingly cool mandate of carrying out the e-government project and all and we’ve heard a lot of talk about e-goernance but what exactly is this e-government project really about?
From the official statement on the government’s website:
Implementation of the e-Government Programme in Zimbabwe
Government is implementing the e-Government programme as part of the public sector reforms in order to re-engineer, re-invigorate and modernize the public sector systems and processes to improve service delivery (speed, access, efficiency, effectiveness and affordability of services) to the people using Information Communication Technologies.
The government also seeks to reduce the operational costs of government institutions, whilst avoid fragmentation and duplication during certain processes. The ultimate goal is to “bring the government closer to people and improve service delivery.” Which we can all agree this has been long overdue.
The website of the OPC also has a listing of some of the e-government undertaking from August 2017 and some of the notable systems include:
- Online Passport Application System;
- E-Taxation – Zimbabwe Revenue Authority;
- E-health at Chitungwiza Hospital;
- Online Liquor Application System;
- Public Finance Management System;
- E-Visa – Department of Immigration; and
- High-Performance Computing System (HPCS).
Two other fairly significant steps the government has taken in line with this e-government program include the promised registration of civil servants through a biometric system to reduce the number of ghost workers. The Vehicle Inspection Department (VID) is also on the digital thrust as the provisional driver’s licence is now being taken using computers (or at least it’s supposed to be).
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I’m really amazed that officials are covering up for their ineptitude by insinuating that a biometric system will identify and exorcise the ghost workers, are these ghost workers really not known? If not, what guarantee is there that their fingerprints will not make it into the fingerprint database?
This reminds me of the old adage where any mistake was assigned to the “computer” when actually the humans were at fault by capturing incorrect, incomplete, inaccurate or false details coupled with software which had poor (or no) validation and verification rules.