South Africa 2.0

SA doesn’t have a glamorous internet history.

Mostly because Telkom (the parastatal, solely-licensed telephone operator) has got a stranglehold on the market, and completely rapes a small minority of internet users. Broadband uptake is pathetic – much like a Magic the Gathering convention, penetration is less than 5%.

Telkom is rightly parodied and derided for being run by fat, overpaid and hopelessly inadequate executives. However, the govt has a big part of play in the quality of service too.

We have one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, right? We’ve been congratulated by the rest of Africa for having 'peaceful, orderly, efficient and transparent elections’. (ok so that last bit doesn’t mean much, but it’s a nice thought ne?)

So, given that SA has general elections coming up in April this year, you think there’d be a nice web 2.0 site with friendly instructions on how to vote, where to vote, what you need to know, etc etc. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise you that such a website had been commissioned.

Indeed, a new site was born! Alas, it was bad. Eye-gougingly bad. String yourself up with piano wire bad. It looked like a team of drunken clowns had clicked randomly in Dreamweaver for 16 hours while strung out on ketamine.

I can’t even SHOW you how bad it is, because this is what you get if you type “http://www.elections.org.za” into your browser:

Go on, try it, I dare you!

To make matters worse, the site (before it went down to chinatown) has already come under criticism for blocking non-IE browsers. Though in the spirit of equal opportunity the site now blocks all browsers.

What I can tell you is that the site “designer”, a certain Malesela Samuel Mogale, is a government employee with a string of unusable and totally abysmal sites under his belt. How much he has been paid for the new IEC Elections site has not been disclosed, though it’s rumoured to be in the millions of Rands.

While it’s great to bleat on about transparent elections, what we really want is transparency at EVERY level of government, right down to the decisions about who builds the stadiums, who runs our IT infrastructure and who designs the websites. Goddit?