South African province spends $15.4M (140M ZAR) on WordPress site | Hacker News Reader

South African province spends $15.4M (140M ZAR) on WordPress site

techcentral.co.za

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The causes behind this are truly more systemic than mere corruption, and actually pull at the very root of problems in Africa and many developing economies in the current tech environment.

In USA/Europe/increasing in China and India, basic tech and internet projects are fairly well understood by the general public. The idea of wordpress, blogs, and even a basic understanding of the internet and modern technology are fairly prevalent. Even with corruption in a small Texan town, something like pushing through a Wordpress site for $15m would be impossible - there is an understanding of how a website is created and what constitutes a million dollar vs a thousand dollar technology project.

I live in South Africa, so I see this every day: there is zero understanding by the majority of the population into any internet related projects. Our major new tech companies tend to boost up the Johannesburg Stock Exchange into incredible valuations before suddenly realizing that their business models are terrible. Most entrepreneurship in the country is focused on targeting townships - people who can barely afford to eat, let alone think about technology, and unsurprisingly, these companies turn to government grants or dissolve.

These are all systemic problems from countries simply not being able to keep up with the rapidly accelerating technological developments - and I think it's going to be a massive problem in the future for any country not focusing on getting into the 'internet rush'. It should be clear to most of us on HN just how important these kind of tech innovations are going to be on the future of humanity.

I lived in South Africa and I wrote my thesis specifically on post-apartheid race politics. There is an added problem here, which is the extent of corruption in so-called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) programs. The contractor here is a black-owned business, which is all well and good, but such companies are often a front for thinly veiled corruption where connected "entrepreneurs" can bleed taxpayers of millions of rand in the name of social progress. Unfortunately, whereas BEE has created some wealthy black businessmen, it has done almost nothing to solve abject poverty among blacks in South Africa, and the program has been captured to an absurd degree. It also can't be criticized, and any challenge to it is denounced as racist. See the last line of this article: "Ntsele told the newspaper opposition parties had an agenda against black businessmen and that the website’s cost was fair."

I've seen many millions of dollars spent on websites, logos, and webpage designs in the United States over the past decade. In many cases, there was clearly A LOT of profit built into the price. $15 million is no doubt a lot for a Wordpress site. But, I've seen $6 million spent on a logo. Is that more or less ridiculous?

Surely it's no less ridiculous. But, to step on some touchy ground here...

The executives who approved the logo were very well-compensated tech industry leaders. And if they made a dumb decision then they deserved the finacial pain and community scorn they deserved. Shame on them. But the folks who paid for the blog were mid-level government officials in a comparatively impoverished nation with little local tech leadership or expertise to draw on. They got duped.

Our moral compass wants to draw different conclusions here. Which is the truth? Damned if I know.

It's really impossible to tell without knowing more details, given how many times gov't clients change requirements it's easily possible that they were just wasting time.

Also speaking of lots of money for wordpress sites, what did AOL pay for Techcrunch?

Apples and oranges. AOL was not buying design and developer time. They were buying talent and eyeballs.

I agree. There could have been many other projects tied into the scope of work.

If you sign the checks, you're still responsible.

The $6 million for a logo was probably many months of work by a well-respected agency for a complete branding package. Not to say that’s not expensive, but when you look at it as a value proposition it could change your perception.

$15 million for a WordPress theme and server is bad value by anyone’s standards.

I work for a city agency in the US. I saw and heard such stories of insane tax payers' money used for affordable technology like adding responsive design to a website (talking close to $1m).

Responsive design for a government website, means, among other things, that it must be handicap-accessible and conform to screenreader guidelines, be viewable on browsers of constituents who may not have purchased a computer in the past decade (i.e., IE6), and also compatible with modern browsers.

This is a lot of work, especially making a website that is screenreader-accessible or works in IE6. You don't get to just abandon those visitors, like so many websites do today. Those people have just as much a right to access a functional government web page as people using modern browsers.

I just checked the site in question and it is not responsive. Being able to conform to screenreaders and older browsers is not difficult by any means and certainly shouldn't cost anywhere near even 1% of what we're talking about here. In my humble opinion.

Personally I tend to think this is corruption though. Stuff like this even happens quite often in the developed world. Some official grants a job to a friend of him and perhaps the profits are shared somehow. A recent example from the Netherlands also involving a Wordpress site (translated to English):

http://bit.ly/W0dUkt

The phrase "Un-fucking-believable" here was extremely jarring, especially since "fucking" was in the original text! Very interesting.

Rather than the cause being something other than corruption, I think this is in addition to corruption. Without corruption all the way to the very core of the government (as it is in SA), we wouldn't have situations such as this. The lowest, cost effective tender would have been chosen after following proper due diligence. In this case the due diligence would mean asking experts (of which there are many in SA) which, combined with the cost of the project, would still have cost a fraction of the R140m.

Hi RyanZAG I'd like to get in touch with you? How may I do this? my email is jkuria [at] gmail

It does seem totally ridiculous, but I think in many cases governments bring these things on themselves with highly complicated tender processes and red-tape (many time in the name of due-process, fairness and transparency)

Imagine putting a bid for this work. Do you think most of the effort is in building the website itself, or dealing with so many bureaucrats, forms, approvals and so on? Making sure your developers have X certification and your office is compliant with Y regulation, and that all your processes are ISO certified and so on... This stuff costs money, and quite a lot.

So any sane company who wishes to enter into business with any government organization usually take these substantial extra costs into account, which ends up inflating the price. The sad thing of course is that it's the citizens who end up footing the bill.

EDIT to clarify: I am not trying to say that the price makes sense in this particular case. I'm talking more about the general problem with govt-related contracts.

Let's dig into these numbers. Assuming the R40m value is correct over 3 years, then:

- since there are 248 working days in a South African year on average, the average daily cost ran to ~R53,763 or ~R6,720 per hour

- at the banks I've worked at, that'll buy you 10 intermediate on-site contract developers, or 6 senior developers, from an average consulting house which factors in all of these overhead expenses (including travel, etc.) you mention... and that's doing skilled development; this is WordPress work, but let's be generous and say they bill the same

It's hard to believe they required anywhere near that many developers (designers are much cheaper and I can't imagine they hired more than 1 or 2), or that hardware/service contracts would have cost much more.

It's fairly clear that this has very little do do with process and bureaucracy and everything to do with corruption.

Looks to me like the price has been inflated by 2 - 3 orders of magnitude, possibly 4. This isn't adding a margin to cope with certification.

Even if there was a requirement for certifications etc (which I seriously doubt), it would not have inflated the price to this extent, especially considering that other companies submitted much cheaper bids.

If your company is not certified to these standards, then you should not be eligible to tender.

I'm from South Africa and this simply demonstrates the extent of corruption within our government departments. It is not uncommon for government departments to inflate tender budgets so as to benefit from kickbacks. I'm appalled by such such acts, firstly as a South African citizen and secondly as a hard working web developer.

And yet, this sounds amateurish compared to the exact same scandal in Italy, but on a national scale: the "official" tourism portal: http://www.italia.it/en/home.html.

It had been calculated that direct and indirect costs of the project summed up to about 140M€ over the years.

At the time, someone put up a dedicated blog on the subject: http://scandaloitaliano.wordpress.com/

The WSJ was on it: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121969807244970447.html

It even won a wikipedia entry: http://translate.google.it/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=h...

This sort of blatant corruption is not uncommon, unfortunately. 2 years back my home country's government spent about $600,000 on Facebook pages:

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/tourism-...

It gets even better, the company that designed the website doesn't even have its own website: http://letlaka.co.za/.

Can you blame them? Have you seen how much websites cost?

Malaysian here! So glad you bring this up!!

I'm from SA as well; this is plain and simple corruption.

It's ridiculous that even with this type of thing happening openly, no opposition party can beat the ruling ANC. We can just hope Ramphele's Agang party will know how to use this type of thing against them.

I can commiserate with you.

I am from India and my college, a govt. college, had roads in college dug out twice every year and had it rebuilt. Later I figured they cited the reason "rain ruined the pathways" :P

My college, being an engineering college, ran its server through some 1 room it firm from the city. I cannot post the link to my college website(It's a shame in the name of websites. I am already ashamed) and that firm doesn't have one. Later I figured that firm's owner(only employee of the firm) was director's relative. Tender was 27 lakh(1 lakh INR is roughly $2000) INR an year.

We didn't have campus wide wired Internet, just a few wireless access points(total 3-4) and nothing in hostel. Later I figured the tender ran in lakhs annually.

There were few permanent faculty members. There was an open rate going for temporary faculty. You pay 30-40% your per diem(or per class) that is approved by Central Govt of India(yes, it was not a state govt college), to college bosses - directors, HOD etc. Later I came to know that the commission went up the ladder till Delhi.

We agitated, we went to the press. Press came to out college. You know what was the news next day - "* college students ran amok".."property damaged".... "They were demonstrating against exam results". Ever damn news paper that came and every damn TV channel that came that day. And nothing bloody else. (Yes, in EEE branch 21 students were failed and everyone of them deserved the fail grade and we never ever fg talk about it during entire day).

Some seniors(we were in first year at that time) even went till Delhi and they couldn't meet anyone. They left the memo with the peon of PMO. Of course no one heard anything.

There's no press, no judiciary here. It's a system that just runs and will be a catastrophe it tempered from either darker side or the brighter side.

But it seems, that's al right because over the time I mellowed down too and the time police asks for some money to lodge a FIR I don't hesitate. Fortunately I have gelled with the system real well.

I'm not sure if you're aware that lakhs (and crore) are not used outside of India... for an international audience it's clearer to write something like "2,700,000 INR" or "2.7 million rupees".

Please be assured that I am aware of this and hence the conversion I've mentioned in 3rd paragraph last line.

If someone reads the comment he/she must have seen that, I have reasons to believe you didn't either(kidding :P). So, they would know what is one lakh INR in dollars(roughly). But yes, they would now know the count in one go. My bad.

AAMOF I should have rather mentioned the $ amount which I can't now.

"Ntsele told the newspaper opposition parties had an agenda against black businessmen and that the website’s cost was fair."

Yeah, right...

This is exactly the kind of corruption which goes on in my country (Hungary). I hereby want to ask every HNer if he wants to team up with me and create a nonprofit startup which lets people document corruption in their country/city etc, things which are too small for wikileaks, or publicity like this.

I don't know about Hungary but in 3rd world countries (I am Brazilian) the worst is not that these things happen, it is that voters are too stupid to care.

One example: a couple years ago it was discovered that the president of the Brazilian Senate and Congress had a child with a mistress and a lobbyist office was paying the child support. It was a scandal that made big news. He resigned from the presidency but remained in the Senate. Later on he was reelected as senator and chosen president of senate again, last month. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renan_Calheiros

Well, that's pretty much Berlusconi's entire political career: 20 years of scandals and still going strong. At the same time, you can expect at least one scandal per French president, but we seem to change them with more regularity.

You should check out the Indian House of Commons, called the Lok Sabha. Rape and bribery are a prereq.

No, they are not. The incidence of criminal cases is large but not in the majority, or a prerogative:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-07-13/india...

Being in the minority doesn't mean they can be treated as outliers. Those ministers have multiple cases against them.

Given the nature of public attitude and their trust in the justice system in a developing country such as India, you can rest assured that the number of reported cases are below the number of actual occurrences.

Jacob Zuma's (the South African President) rape trail would seem relevant here.

Check out http://bribespot.com/ -- they are doing pretty much the same thing.

I will look into it, thanks for the heads up.

also http://www.ipaidabribe.com/

No email in your profile.

I have been thinking about this for some time now and I feel the biggest factor in using this is localization. Nature of corruption is different in most countries, the startup will need to address that.

I'm down...email me? ping@namank.com.

Updated my profile. You can reach me at janosdobronszki at citromail dot hu

But we must check out the mentioned bribespot thingie first.

Add me to your list as well - I'd like to do something in this space. me@alexmuir.com

I think there are a lot of places where this is happening and the more we can out it, the better it will be. I don't think we should just let it pass.

As a brazilian noted, voters don't know they should pay attention to it, politicians are ok with status quo, but we should press on.

I am looking into this site mentioned, BribeSpot.com

This nonprofit exists already: http://www.transparency-usa.org/

I was involved in a project for the SA Government portal back in ...the late 2000's.... and I remember how much bullshit we had to put up with to get the contract. At the end of a year and a half of developing a highly custom CMS system for them to manage the portal they canned the project (and the few million ZAR of taxpayer money they'd payed us) only to contract in some small black owned company to develop something. I suspect this is linked.

I need to meet this Tumi Ntsele person. She's a friggin' genius.

Found the theme used on the site http://www.londonthemes.com/themes/londonlive/

$40 theme = R140m (that how thing roll in South Africa)

You're forgetting about the 385,000% income tax.

The website in question: http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za/

It's ridiculously slow for me. The site has been loading for 1.4 minutes and I've only received 146KB so far and there's still nothing on the screen.

Well worth the price..

> It's ridiculously slow for me.

Installing WP Supercache is an extra R40,000,000.

These news just might have increased the traffic a tad.

Come on... these people never expected web scale nor should they have paid/designed/engineered for it (that said for the price they paid my comment is rather f*ing sarcastic)

Timed out for me.

> Your cache administrator is webmaster.

With a link to "mailto: webmaster". They don't even know how to use email addresses apparently.

What are you basing that on? Your placement to the servers?

A lot of american websites hosted decent places (Bluebox comes to mind) is also slow from European connections. You need to calculate your location to the servers if you want to know if something is slow or not.

It's slow from South Africa, too. Source: I'm here.

OTOH, it was fine this morning -- it's clearly suffering from HN/Reddit effect/Slashdot effect.

I actually hope the development company is stuck with the bandwidth bill. Should at least take a little bit off that ridiculous profit.

Bandwidth in South Africa is quite expensive (see http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/vps-co-za-a-lowendbox-in-south... for a range estimate). I wouldn't be surprised if a sizeable chunk of the cost is estimates for bandwidth charges based on a serious over estimation of unique visitors. And perhaps a rounded up premium on the base price of each gig of bandwidth

Any "bandwidth cost" being a key part of the cost is likely a red herring.

It appears the IP address of the host (163.195.16.73) is owned by the SA government, so they are likely paying for bandwidth, not the contractor that developed the site. In my opinion this probably means bandwidth isn't part of the quoted cost. See http://www.afrinic.net and a DNS lookup for http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za/ - which is a CNAME for iproxy1.openet.gov.za. Of course I've not seen any contracts here or similar, so I could be wrong, but it's certainly how I'd expect the contract to be managed.

Regarding high bandwidth costs, the SA government has a significant stake in the monopoly telco provider (Telkom SA - http://www.moneyweb.co.za/moneyweb-corporate-governance/pic-... says it's 39.8% government owned).

My opinion is that bandwidth costs are high in SA because of the monopoly. There are some references/articles about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telkom_(South_Africa)#Criticism...

So even if the costs are high, it doesn't really matter to the Government - they are getting 39.8% of the costs back from their other investments - it's just the rest of the technology sector that suffers.

Oskar

This is the supposed web developer's website: http://www.cherryonline.co

Registered with a South African ISP, but a Colombian top level domain. ( .co.za is South African). Real pros at work...

Just a normal money laundering process with prearranged kickbacks.

In Russia this website would cost at least $30m.

So it's running an exploited version of WordPress and suddenly has a significant amount of people looking at it? This always ends well.

Good money if you can get it though, $15.4m for knocking something out in a few days and job is done. Sit back and order some mojitos.

The Wordpress theme they used to make the website:

http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine...

$40 on Theme Forest

For a $15 million site you think they'd compress their CSS and javascript.

They didn't do much customization at all. They used an already-existing Wordpress theme. Compare the site to the theme: http://www.londonthemes.com/themes/londonlive/

This is similar to the story a few days ago about West Virginia spending $5 million on Cisco routers it did not need. In general government tend to be overcharged. This is not unique to Africa.

Also some of the cost is justified. Getting government contracts requires paperwork and meeting conditions that add to the cost of the contract. Also government payment cycles are different. So the contractor has to build in some margin for delayed payments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5283160

~$12,999,987.00 margin on this one

The theme being used called "London Live" is for sale here: http://themeforest.net/item/london-live-3-in-1-news-magazine...

Costs 40 dollars.

Same thing happened in Romania with a lot of govt. websites. The worst thing is they are usually unusable crap... costing millions of taxpayers money.

Sometimes I feel like starting a consultancy that prepares fair price quotes for technology implementations for governments, but doesn't actually do them so there is no conflict of interest. That way governments can pay $1000 upfront to see if the bids they are getting are over or under.

I can't see this wonder, because it gives me a Connection Refused error. :)

Without seeing the proposal or statement of work from the website developer, I'm not going to comment on whether this is an outrage or not.

Broken by the high traffic, no doubt. Guess they're gonna be hitting the coffers for load testing soon...

That's what they get for using Dreamhost.

Man.... how do I get in on this racket?

And the site is down. Ops.

The real figure is R40m.

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