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Joe Mcgluwa, the ID Spokesperson for Human Settlements has called on Government to strengthen the Public Service Commission (PSC) ‘by significantly increasing its resource allocation.'

The Public Service Commission is responsible for implementing a Transversal M&E System, which the PSC designed to evaluate the performance of Public Service Departments against "the nine constitutional values and principles (CVPs) governing public administration," according to the PSC itself.

‘In today's Human Settlements Portfolio Committee meeting I was shocked to hear that the PSC has in some cases only managed to conduct audits of government departments once in 10 years,' Mr Mcgluwa says.

‘The results of the PSC's Human Settlements assessment, which showed that there were no records of the Department's management responding to internal quarterly reports, or doing anything about highlighted weaknesses, were equally worrying.

‘This kind of lack of professional ethics within the Department makes monitoring and evaluation a pipe dream. From the responses of the PSC to my questions it became clear that instead of including the people on the ground in their studies, the PSC uses its interaction with the specific department's management as its sole source of information,' says Mcgluwa.

The ID Member of Parliament also cautioned Government to ‘not allow transformation to move backwards.

‘It is of major concern that in terms of reporting on representivity, there has been a significant slide backwards over the past decade,' Mcgluwa says.

While in 2001/02 the PSC gave the Department a 60% score when it comes to representivity, in 2009/10 that fell to just 40%, a "poor performance..."

‘And this has translated into a sad state of affairs for marginalized groups, particularly women. For example, on 31 March it was found that just 22 out of 56 officials on senior management level were women, which was 11% below the required standard of 50% for that date,' says Mcgluwa.