There is growing public outcry after National Transport and Safety Authority’s TIMS system jammed now for the last one month.
According to individual motor vehicle dealers and owners, registration of new vehicles and transfers cannot happen now for 4 weeks as NTSA refuse to give a reason why the system is now working. While the old system is still accessible on TIMS.NTSA site, the new system is available on TIMSVIRL.NTSA URL and hasn’t been working for the entire period.
Employees and other stakeholders I know of say that the old system which was a donation from Huawei was closed as the Chinese firm refused to give NTSA access to the source code for upgrade and disaster recovery. The new system has been acquired at a cost of Ksh 500 million from a company associated with well-connected directors of Copy Cat Limited.
Now management believes that the system is being sabotaged by employees as it doesn’t allow fraudulent activities like double registration and employees’ jumping of queue in the transfer of vehicles.
Re-registration is when motor-dealers with vehicles having new vehicles with old number plates demand new plates. So top management always collude with such dealers and issue new plates.
An example is a dealer with KCY vehicle in the showroom but wanting it to have a KDE plate. With Kenyans mostly influenced by latestness of vehicle plates to pay more, dealers have greatly cashed on this. Such re-registration can only be done by the top-level management.
Junior NTSA employees have previously sabotaged such re-registration when their own money minting schemes were stopped.
Some within the ICT Ministry blame the current system problem at NTSA on sabotage as the new system has generated an audit trail showing the kind of fraudulent activities which were in the old system. So those involved are thought to be actively sabotaging the new system.
NTSA’s problems are said to be worsened by the fact that they are now under the Interior Ministry where the management uses the “national security” excuse to block anyone asking questions about such system breakdowns or sabotage. Board has also been rendered useless as most of the key decisions are being made by the Interior Ministry and communicated down to the management as orders.
The TIMS system issues at NTSA has been so bad that the key users like motorcycle dealers had an urgent meeting with the management earlier this week.
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