Truckers in a spin over enatis shenanigans

A legal battle, a mass staff resignation, and suggestions that, without this staff, the Electronic National Administration Traffic Information System (enatis) could collapse. That’s the Hydra that’s facing the private company, Tasima, which runs the enatis system. Add to this claims, reported to be from inside the company, that the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) is trying to hijack Tasima’s current role. All a heavyweight ‘oucha' for the company that processes and stores data for the country’s network of vehicle and drivers’ licensing departments. And the suspected involvement of the RTMC has raised some hackles in the road transport industry. It’s not particularly good news for a business that relies on enatis to keep its trucks and drivers legally licensed and on the roads, according to Kevin Martin, MD of Freightliner. The RTMC, he added, does not have a good track record, and at least once was reported to be “technically insolvent”. Indeed, at this time last year, the former RTMC board was found by the new RTMC board to have irregularly spent R360m and used up R17m on fruitless and wasteful expenditure in 2010. And transport minister Dipuo Peters said that “a number of irregularities and instances of mismanagement of resources, as well as maladministration in the entity”, had been discovered. And this rather doubtful entity already runs (or doesn’t run too well) the Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences (Aarto) system, which has stuttered along as a pilot scheme for seven years without yet going national. All this revolves round a scheme for the department of transport (DoT) and RTMC to take over enatis from Tasima. That’s where this legal shemozzle comes in – with Tasima waging a courtroom battle with the two about how the handover should take place. This takeover battle is nothing new, according to Gavin Kelly, technical and operations manager of the Road Freight Association (RFA). “About five years ago,” he told FTW, “the RTMC said it wanted control of enatis. That word ‘control’ is a very broad description. But it can be presumed that it certainly wanted to be able to interrogate the enatis data base without having to pay a private company for that privilege.” But that left one problem – the credibility of the enatis data base. “This,” said Kelly, “suffers from various weaknesses, especially on its receipt and input of licensing data from provincial and metropolitan municipalities.” Now, he added, the RTMC needs real-time access to the data for its own functions. But the data still remains remiss. The logical way around this, according to Kelly, would be the national issue to absolutely all road users of the proposed new ‘intelligent number plates’. These RFID-tagged plates with a unique identification code can, amongst other things, effectively be used to track a vehicle’s movements and could, for example, replace e-tags for toll road usage. It’s a scheme that has been on the cards since February 1, 2010, with an original implementation date of October 2010. But, like many other greatsounding government schemes, it is still in abeyance. “At the same time,” he added, “this use of intelligent plates would allow the RTMC to have complete, real-time data of vehicle licensing and vehicle movements for its other functions to work with.” INSERT R360m Alleged irregular expenditure by the former RTMC board. INSERT & CAPTION It’s not good news for a business that relies on enatis to keep its trucks and drivers legally licensed and on the roads. – Kevin Martin