Goodbye 10111 – government to cut down South Africa’s emergency hotlines
The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies has submitted a proposal to the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (Icasa) to consider phasing out several emergency telephone numbers in the country.
The department has proposed that the SAPS hotline 10111 be phased out, along with 10177 (medical emergency) and 107 (emergency, fire, rescue, ambulance).
In effect, the proposal is that only one emergency number remains in place in South Africa – 112.
According to the department, the Electronic Communications Act provides for matters relevant to the 112 public emergency number, which Icasa oversees.
While the regulations prescribe other emergency numbers (10111, 10177 and 107), the department believes having one exclusive emergency contact (112) is the best option for the country.
“Even though no public 112 Emergency Centre was established, electronic communications network service licensees use their own communication centres where the 112 emergency numbers is routed to, which others use Automatic Voice Response to route the call to the relevant destination,” it said.
One sticky point in the regulations is that it stipulates that the country can’t have a singular number until it establishes 112 emergency centres.
To ensure that the 112 number becomes the exclusive national public emergency number, (Icasa) should consider amending the regulations to delete references to public 112 emergency centres.
“Therefore, the transitional provisions should not be dependent on the establishment of the first public 112 emergency centre, but should rather commence upon the amendment of the regulations,” it said.
The proposal has been gazetted for public comment for 30 days.
Dropped calls
South Africa has experienced significant problems with its emergency numbers, particularly the SAPS’ 10111 hotline.
A parliamentary response earlier this year indicated that, on average, only 41.31% of SAPS emergency call centre positions are filled.
These staffing issues have contributed to the fact that since 2018/19, 14.9 million calls to 10111 were abandoned in 11 out of the country’s 19 centres.
Abandoned calls are either not answered by an agent, the caller hangs up before an agent answers, or the call has ultimately been disconnected.
The understaffing of 10111 call centres and multiple system failures led to 26.2% of calls (14.9 million out of 56.99 million) to 11 SAPS centres being abandoned since 2018.
Important to note that the data provided is incomplete and thus skewed, as eight centers do not have information due to non-operational telephone management systems that record calls.
The gazetted proposal can be viewed below:
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