Date: 15/02/04
Source: Ministry of Public Service and Administration
Title: Fraser-Moleketi: Debate on State of the Nation Address

Input by the Hon Minister, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, in the Parliamentary Debate on the State of the Nation Address

15 February 2005


Madame Speaker, Mr President, Honourable Members of the House:

In 1955 at Kliptown the Congress of the People declared that "The People shall Govern". Under this heading the Freedom Charter asserted that:
* Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws;
* All people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country;
* The rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex;
* All bodies of minority rule, advisory boards, councils and authorities shall be replaced by democratic organs of self-government.

Five decades later it is appropriate to reflect on our progress in terms of realising the society that we set out to achieve at Kliptown. Today I will restrict myself to the point that "all people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country".

This single sentence conveys a wealth of meaning and touches on a great many issues that are critical for our programme of administrative reforms.

First, “taking part” in the administration begins with the citizen’s privilege and duty to take part in the process of electing a representative government. This duly elected government then has the responsibility to govern - to make decisions and allocate resources on behalf of the people in situations where direct representation is not practical. It is only such a government that enjoys the legitimacy to act on behalf of the population as a whole. However, the elective representatives - be they councillors, members of provincial legislatures and the Member of Parliament - have a duty to keep in touch with those they represent. Although the mandate of representation is formally renewed every five years the system of representation is built on the assumption of a healthy relationship of communication between citizen and representative.

Tweedens, dit moet vir elke burger wat aan die vereistes van ‘n vakante pos voldoen om oorweeg te word vir ‘n pos in die staatsdiens. Die staatsdiens in sy geheel moet lyk soos die bevolking daar buite. Ons het dit op uiters goeie gesag, beide in die teorie en in die praktyk, maar ook polities, dat dit essensieel is dat ons hierdie ideaal moet bereik. Gegewe Suid-Afrika se geskiedenis was dit noodsaaklik om op regstellende aksie staat te maak om hierdie punt te kan bereik. In “Ready to Govern”, the ANC elaborated on how it saw affirmative action unfolding in order to achieve this, and I quote:
“We do not support giving positions to unqualified people simply on the grounds of race or gender. What we will insist on, however, is that the hundreds of thousands of highly merit-worthy persons who have been unjustifiably kept out of jobs, denied advancement in their careers and excluded from training, be given their due. Those who have been kept back by apartheid education and by sexist assumptions should be given special backing to catch up. The rich life experiences, knowledge of languages, and cultural diversity of those previously discriminated against should be seen as enriching the contribution of individual South Africans.”
Thirdly, it is the needs of the people that give direction to what the administration does. In other words, the administration should respond to the needs of the population and hear and take on board the input and feedback from the grassroots. In our Vision 2014, the ANC calls for the delivery of “compassionate government service to the people”. This embodies our Batho Pele/ People First approach that includes not only responsiveness, but also transparency, accessibility, and accountability.

In the fourth instance, administration should be participatory: consultative in decision-making, but more than that: implementation should happen in partnership where appropriate; information should be shared on a wide-scale; monitoring and evaluation should not be a narrow technical, nor secretive undertaking. It should be done in collaboration with communities. This will result in a dense pattern of interaction between government and the people, which in turn will contribute to a more responsive government. It will allow us to work in an empowering way, recognising the value of knowledge of ordinary people as opposed to expert knowledge.

In die finale instansie, vir al die “permanensie” en tegniese kundigheid wat in die administrasie opgesluit is kan die amptenary nie ‘n mag op hulle eie wees nie. Amptenare bly verantwoordbaar aan die mense van hierdie land, en hulle verkose teenwoordigers. Here there exists a strong oversight role for parliament and its institutions. This does not negate the traditional role of the Executive, as the interface between the people’s representatives and the administration. Democratic systems are built on a system of carefully balanced and institutionalised rights and obligations.

When many institutionalised channels exist for citizens to make themselves heard in the system, one would not expect to see behaviour that registers at the upper ends of repertories of violent and disruptive behaviour. When honest feedback and accurate evidence are valued in a system, one would not expect disinformation and smear campaigns.

All this and more was implied by the one little sub-clause in the Freedom Charter: “All shall have the right to participate in the administration”.

Let me demonstrate how we give meaning to these values by reflecting on some aspects of Government’s Programme of Action in the G&A Cluster.

* The Community Development Worker Cadre is an excellent example of ensuring a responsive administrative system that will result in an empowered citizenry. These workers will strengthen the bond between the people and government. They perform at the interface between the administration across (all three spheres of government), political representatives and the people. They are extremely important carriers of information and messages in different directions:
* From the people to the respective administrations to unblock implementation delays;
* between different spheres of government and different sectors to improve on coordination and bring about integrated administration,
* from government to the people to inform them of different opportunities and government services, and how to access these;
* from the people and administrations to the political representatives to flag the need for decisions and actions at a political level.

More than 500 of these workers have already been trained and are deployed since the start of this year. We have also established a relationship with India for the further training of initially 30 of our CDWs. Members will know that India is renowned for its successful approaches to community development work and we hope that particularly rural communities will greatly benefit from this international skills transfer.

In the short time of them being operational, the CDWs in Gauteng could already report to me on a substantial body of successful interventions. These include examples in terms of social development (e.g. development of food gardens in Katlehong, Diepsloot, Thokoza, Lanzeria, Orange Farm and so forth; establishing that a child who was found roaming the streets in Bekkersdal was actually the victim of abuse at the hand of a family relative and was taken to a safe house); health issues (facilitating access to health facility, ranging in cases from a person suffering from leprosy, to rape and assault victims; facilitating training and health awareness in terms of the TB - DOTS home based care programmes and sexually transmitted diseases, and so forth); housing (solving problems regarding access to housing finance, getting title deeds, explaining local authority action to residents where removals take place from dilapidated buildings that constitute health and fire dangers, infrastructure and municipal service problems e.g. electricity, sewage, water), education related matters (campaigning in terms of a safe education environments and the protection of education facilities against vandalism; early registration of learners to anticipate problems with over-crowding, parents not in possession of the necessary documentation, and so forth) economic development issues (doing referrals of small entrepreneurs to appropriate institutions/ support resources, e.g. Umsobomvu, dti, Labour, NDA; involvement in LDE projects of local governments); community safety issues (assisting the public to get to police stations after muggings, road accidents and so forth; organising neighbourhood watches); transport issues (with respect to learners, the aged, access to extended public works employment programmes) etc., etc.

Once the CDW programme is completely operational we hope that some of the heartbreaking stories we read in the press of members of the public coming up against impersonal bureaucratic machinery will be something of the past. One news story that we then would not like to read about is one carried by City Press this past Sunday. It deals with the plight of 77 year old wheel-chair bound Susan Magome whose pension fund was suspended after officials insisted that she should physically report to a Home Affairs office to verify that she was actually still alive. By the time we have trained CDWs in each municipality, it would mean that such a worker would visit the home of Ms Magome and verify on behalf of Home Affairs that Ms Magome is alive, thus preventing problems with her qualifying for her pension as well as other government benefits.

* The effort we have made to create a representative administration through setting Employment Equity targets is another example of how we translate the values of the Freedom Charter into reality. The President has mentioned that by mid-year we will re-visit the targets for women and people living with a disability.

Our goal to create a representative administration is not shared by all, and recently is receiving criticism from unexpected quarters. I want to refer back to President Mandela's closing address on the state of the nation in February 1999. He said and I quote: "The progress that we have started to make in all sectors of government will not be sustainable, if we do not consistently and systematically change the composition … of the public service". It is therefore completely predictable that skilled cadres who dedicate themselves to this government and its programme of action will be approached to fill positions in the public sector. As long as due process is followed our position on this matter is completely defensible.

* Our Batho Pele policy remains the backbone to give effect to the notion of citizen-centred administration. The most recent Batho Pele action programme approved by Cabinet makes provision for a mix of quick wins, medium and long term strategies. These range from e-government, to educating citizens about their rights in relation to public services, to perform against a set of BP relevant indicators compulsory for senior managers and other public servants. The Batho Pele ICT Gateway and the system of Multi-Purpose Community Centres, once fully developed, will use ICT to improve access to information to ordinary people. In turn, we use technology to consolidate back office operations and the front-office experience that the public has of us so that we can provide seamless, fully integrated public services that responds to the needs of our people.

Notwithstanding our efforts to create administrative machinery in which all our people can take part, the output of the machinery is often still lacking - both qualitatively and materially.

Capacity limitations are persistent obstacles to better and more extensive service delivery. The extremely negative impact of weak capacity is more severe because the developmental state needs particularly strong capacity to execute its mandate. Strong capacity to coordinate at the centre of government, strong capacity to regulate service delivery where we opt for an indirect service delivery channel (e.g. telecommunications) and strong capacity to render services directly to the public, such as education and health.

With regard to the latter the President already announced that in key sectors we are boosting the numbers of officials, while at the same time hopefully also addressing issues of motivation and commitment by improving on the remuneration packages of professionals such as educators, health and police officials. We further intend strengthening the human resource planning function in the public sector to prevent further problems down-stream in terms of supplying in the future capacity needs of the public sector. The South African Management Development Institute has been gearing up to play a much more meaningful role in terms of public sector training. A number of international relationships that will result in high-level expertise development have been established and/ or re-kindled. Among these are our relations with India, Brazil and Singapore, to mention but a few.

Later in this year we intend introducing a system of "sustainable recruitment pools" of fast-tracked individuals at the middle management level in the public sector. This will necessitate a review of our recruitment practices that hitherto has been predominantly externally focussed. Internships and learnership systems have been strengthened in the public service and should start bearing fruit shortly.

An aspect not entirely separate from capacity, but which to a degree is much more invidious to deal with is the issue of ethos - this includes the so-called softer issues of attitude, value orientation and "culture". The President chose to attribute the characteristics of "negligent" and "tardy" to some of our public servants. Some public servants also qualify for other labels, including “rude” and “self-serving”. We are constantly reminded of these when we read the newspapers or tune into talk radio shows where the public speak their minds. We also have some corrupt public servants within our ranks notwithstanding an anti-corruption framework that we have put in place that competes with the best in the world. Getting to the root causes of these and dealing decisively with these is not necessarily a short-term project. It is well-known that organisational cultural changes are some of the most difficult to achieve. We have made a start by developing a compulsory induction course for all public servants - across the board.

Obviously all of us who care, including political office holders, public servants, community members, the media and so forth, should work together to identify officials that do not do us proud, so that the system can deal with them - either by emphasising re-training and orientation, or by instituting disciplinary procedures. The power of example should further not be underestimated. The Izimbizo has turned out to be quite a powerful mechanism in identifying problematic officials and the follow-up to revelations by community members can be improved on even further. Similarly, the media exposes a number of cases and we need to improve on how as government we proactively deal with the problems that are raised through that medium. Through constituency work and general accessibility, people's representatives are bombarded with anecdotes and substantial evidence. The challenge is how to deal with all the feedback that we receive in a systematic and prompt way.

What I want to do emphatically is to quell the idea I see the Hon Leon has voiced last week at a meeting of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and that was re-hashed in The Citizen yesterday. This is the idea that we need to bring private sector solutions into public sector problems. If Tony Leon has bothered to familiarise himself with the most recent international scholarship on public sector reform before he tries to pass himself off as an expert, he would have known that a strong consensus is emerging that one of the biggest mistakes that was committed in recent years in the field of public sector reform is to do exactly what he is proposing, i.e. ignoring the unique attributes of working in the public sphere and trying to, in an uncritical manner, transfer private sector solutions into the public domain.

For purposes of today, I will quote some statements from the literature, but if he is interested I can supply him with an entire reading list.

In 1998 the UNDP concluded that “market-based approaches” (otherwise known under the label of New Public Management in the literature) constitutes a “limited vision of civil service reform”, in that it tends to focus on short-term cost-containment measures aimed primarily at payment and employment systems.”
In 2001 the first World Public Sector Report published by the UN states that “on the administrative side, New Public Management and reinventing government have been effective tools in improving the efficiency of the public sector and in reducing costs. However, notwithstanding some of the positive results derived from these reforms, the retreat of the State in social areas (health care, education and housing) has been detrimental for many developing countries”.

Henry Mintzberg, one of the leading critics of NPM declares that “business can learn from government no less than government can learn from business” and that while privatisation is to some extent “probably useful” a “good deal of it is also just plain silly”.

However, the final moisture on Leon’s gunpowder must come from David Osborne and Ted Gaebler two of the originators and strongest advocates of New Public Management. They declare that those who advocate privatisation on ideological grounds because they fundamentally believe business is always superior to government “are selling the American people snake oil … business does some things better than government, but government does some things better than business”.

Allow me to use this latter statement to point to the double standards meted out to government. Yesterday Die Burger reported, based on the SABC-Markinor survey, that the vast majority of 3 500 respondents in its survey give government a very bad report card for “not creating jobs”. However, prevailing liberal economic wisdom says that job creation should be left to the market/ private sector and public sector jobs creation should not be allowed. Our colleagues in the DP benches will get a fit if we embark on large-scale public sector job creation. However, when our performance is measured our liberal friends in the private sector are happy to let government take the flack and they do not own up to their own failures of not playing their part in creating jobs and limiting job losses, by for example, opting for more labour intensive mechanisms that might be more costly and troublesome, but in the interest of society as a whole! Either way as government our flanks are exposed while we operate within a globalised environment where the most powerful uncritically embraces a fundamentally liberal agenda.

We have spent a lot of time during the past five years trying to understand the different dimensions of our own shortcomings and what contributes to those. Obviously that effort helps us to make better decisions on interventions that we have to take. However, I believe that more urgent action is now called for. In Uganda, there is a saying that if a snake comes into your house, do not waste time asking where it has come from. Kill it first and ask the questions afterwards. I think we must recognise that some snakes have nested in our public service house. These snakes pose a threat to optimum performance across the board. We have to deal with these decisively before they become a threat to the entire goal that we are working towards, i.e.

* A high quality of government service for all - guaranteed by the Constitution.

* A public service based on the principles of representivity, competency, impartiality and accountability.

* A public service drawn from and serving the interests of the public as a whole

Issued by: Ministry of Public Service and Administration
15 February 2005