SITA complains of poaching

By Leon Engelbrecht for SITA
Johannesburg, 20 Nov 2007

The State IT Agency (SITA) has complained to the National Assembly's Portfolio Committee on Safety and Security that poaching by government departments and entities is making it difficult for it to discharge its mandate.

SITA is involved in a number of policing projects, including the development of an electronic docket system, a crime-mapping system and a criminal database. The agency was one of a number of entities appearing before the committee last week to make progress reports.

Commenting on the SITA submission and another by the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), the police watchdog, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said the "problem is verging on a crisis".

The party says SITA stated there was a gentleman's agreement not to poach other departments' staff, but this agreement was now being ignored.

The DA says it is extremely critical of this new trend that is seeing government departments "poach technically skilled staff from sister departments in a never ending chase... within the limited pool of qualified personnel in SA".

The ICD told the portfolio committee that it loses many of its staff to other government departments, who poach staff with skills and experience by offering them better salaries. SITA, says the DA, reported a similar problem.

"The result is a situation where there is an ongoing shortage of critical skills as resigning or transferring staff have to be replaced," says DA safety and security spokesman Dianne Kohler Barnard.

"The ICD and SITA are forced into a position where they, in effect, provide free training of candidates for other state departments and, to a certain extent, to the lucrative private sector too."

She adds that the ability of the ICD and SITA to fulfil their mandates is being compromised by the poaching of safety and security staff.

"At the end of the day, it is the public who suffer - while the other state departments and the private sector are spared the effort and cost of providing their own training and skilling their own staff," she says.

Neither SITA nor the police could, by this morning, comment on the DA's concerns.