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.
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.
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.