GovTech 2025 hawks digital dreams in decaying Durban

“Can I get a flat white, please?” I asked the waiting staff at the hotel. None of them knew what I was talking about. I guess the warning from security staff at the Durban International Convention Centre that I couldn’t (not shouldn’t) walk 900m to the hotel on the beachfront in the CBD should have been the first red flag. Waking up to a staring competition with a cockroach after dozing off was the second.

I’m happy I got my interview with Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Solly Malatsi on day one. On day two of GovTech 2025, it was the turn of the State Information Technology Agency’s (Sita’s) acting managing director, Gopal Reddy, and he seemed energised by the big reveal of the agency’s digital platform.

Read more: Wisdom of Solomon — Malatsi’s gospel for a digital South Africa

But first, there were some sign-off words from Malatsi, who wasn’t staying for the launch. “I view connectivity as a basic right,” said the minister before challenging the government to “innovate around citizen service journeys”.

His words hung heavy — remember, this is the minister who gave government departments licence to bypass Sita entirely, effectively neutering the state IT agency’s monopoly.

Float like a butterfly 

Reddy opened proceedings on Monday with a petition to “own the shift” and a commitment that Sita was “repositioning itself as the central house of digital transformation”. It was a parry of Malatsi’s sucker punch: Please don’t make us irrelevant.

Viewed as a political dance, it was exquisite under the lights — there was an entertaining interplay. Malatsi spoke of making the government “simpler, more digital and more affordable”.

Reddy countered by showcasing Sita’s new initiatives. One was the conference’s centrepiece: Sita’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) automation launch, presented as the solution to the government’s procurement nightmares.

Think about it: automated sourcing, real-time tracking, transparent processes, faster delivery. Simpler, more digital, and we don’t know how much it costs.

“This is not about technology but about service delivery at the end of the day,” insisted Sita’s executive responsible for applications development. The emphasis was another defensive move, as if acknowledging that too often, government tech projects become monuments to technological complexity rather than citizen service.

Grumbles in the jungle 

“We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” was the feedback from a couple of Sita admin staff who grabbed the open seats next to me at lunch after the soft launch. They seemed excited, but gave the impression that they hadn’t spent any time with the system.

When asked, they confirmed my suspicions but said they had seen a demo. There were dancing youths and flashing lights, but the SCM system is still very much vapourware.

Read more: Africa has an AI skills problem that is forcing a youth empowerment rethink

Sita execs promise that, when it does launch, the new system will address the “delays in publishing, opaque evaluations, manual adjudication and poor contract visibility” that have become government procurement’s calling cards. If it works, it could genuinely transform how the state buys tech.

But with the option now open for government departments to procure their own IT solutions, Sita’s window to prove itself is rapidly closing.

Beyond the digital delusions 

The most honest conversations happened in the panel discussions and breakout sessions about digital sovereignty and artificial intelligence. Here, speakers wrestled with uncomfortable truths about South Africa's technological dependence.

“We are very sophisticated,” said one speaker about Africa’s digital landscape. “But the problem with our sophistication is that we don’t own it. And because we don’t own it, we can't govern it.”

The room grew quiet as delegates contemplated the implications. For all the talk of digital transformation, Mzansi remains largely a consumer of technology developed elsewhere, governed by rules written in Silicon Valley boardrooms.

Professor Mpho Primus, co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Johannesburg, insists that data should be seen not as the new oil but as “soil from which we’re going to get our economic and social prosperity”.

I wish I had something better than the black brew from the Jacob’s dispensing machine to sip on while contemplating that metaphor. Soil needs cultivation, local knowledge and patient tending. Oil gets extracted and exported.

Exclusion and innovation

I was lucky enough to catch Primus’ closing address on day three. She was in prime intellectual combat condition, fighting back the tech vendors with truth bombs like “one out of 10 South Africans speaks English at home”, meaning “nine out of 10 South Africans don’t speak English at home”.

It was a strike aimed at the Department of Home Affairs’ @Home initiative, which was, by all accounts, the first fruit of Malatsi’s procurement policy labours.

Read more: Leon Schreiber’s digital Home Affairs dreams are becoming reality

More telling is that here we were, at a conference conducted entirely in English, discussing technologies like the proposed Citizen Super App, developed primarily in English, designed to serve citizens who largely don’t communicate in English with the government.

How do you build inclusive digital services while excluding most of your intended users from the very conversation about building them?

Primus pitches the idea that SA’s secret sauce is communal innovation, and it must be used as an alternative to Silicon Valley’s fast-paced, hyper-scale model that doesn’t “care for anything or anyone, be it the communities or environment”.

Now I have to wrestle with the idea that the stokvel is an iconic financial innovation and that the government needs to make solutions that fit the culture rather than importing someone else’s idea of efficiency.

Traffic-free zone

“There’s no traffic in Durban,” the Uber driver told me on day one.

There’s no super app that can bring the hipsters back from Umhlanga by sea to the CBD. Sita envisions birth registrations on your smartphone, but the abandoned buildings will still be crumbling. The toilets in the state hospitals will still be out of order.

The conference expo floor may as well be a parallel dimension. Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Huawei and Cassava have impressive stands that are basically altars to the awesomeness of AI and automation. These are the high-speed on-ramps to the supposed GNU dawn.

Meanwhile, SAP, the former darling of the Mbeki and Zuma-era failed digital revolution, has been reduced to a small stand just off to the right.

Sita’s existential crisis might be South Africa’s opportunity.

With departments free to choose their own IT paths, there’s space for genuine innovation, for technologies that speak local languages and understand local contexts.

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Flat white, mad city 

I had to wait until I sat down at the airport Mugg & Bean to find a waiter who spoke my coffee language.

Reddy closed off the conference by announcing that GovTech would return to the same venue in 2026, challenging attendees to hold the agency accountable to the commitments made in 2025. Maybe it was just the tracks I joined, but this year felt like a lot of talking with little solution-finding.

Hopefully, the interim board can achieve the promised digital transformation that will serve the citizens in the same way Edward Kieswetter, the 2025 Sita Digital Public Service Award winner in the category of technology leader, did at the SA Revenue Service. DM