I have 20 years’ experience in the construction of big information technology (IT) systems to support engineering megaprojects. The Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) payment system is such a system. But it’s not actually very complicated; it is made to appear complicated. It transfers small amounts of cash to 15-million or so beneficiaries every month. But it could just as well be 10,000 beneficiaries or 1,000. The number "17-million" is a club brandished with reckless abandon to underscore the complexity, but that is BS. It’s just the number of transactions the computers have to process. If you can get it right for 1,000 beneficiaries, the number doesn’t matter — you could process 170-million transactions. You would simply need a couple more computers. Banks routinely transfer billions of rand every day. The systems are in place and the protocols have been in place for years. The IT system used by CPS is written and tested. The work flow is established. The ancillary services are in pl...
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