Date: 22/09/2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: N Pandor: Senior Management Service Conference
ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, N PANDOR, MP, AT THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT SERVICE CONFERENCE, "BUILDING A DEVELOPMENTAL STATE: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THE TWO ECONOMIES: A PUBLIC SERVICE RESPONSE", Cape Town ICC, 22 September 2004
"SKILLS REQUIREMENTS FOR A DEVELOPMENTAL STATE - A FOCUS ON KEY ROLE-PLAYERS"
Chairperson, senior managers, guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a great pleasure to be with you this morning to contribute to the ongoing debate on how we might improve our national orientation to development. To the many who fought for change in South Africa it may seem strange that "better at development" is still a matter of discussion when we are free. Observers of our country probably assumed we knew exactly what to do when we got the vote, but the challenges are proving somewhat intractable and clearly more able more effective public servants are key to attaining success.
Recent analyses of South Africa's progress in the first ten years have pointed to increased achievement in providing a better life to the people of South Africa, but they also indicate the massive gaps of change and development that we must still confront. One of the most pervasive features of recent analyses is the characterisation of two economies of social and economic activity. All of you would agree that this typology exists within the public service as much as in every other sector.
Many government services tend to be delivered in one of two modes. One is clean and efficient, kind and responsive, uses new technologies, and has the necessary resources. The other is dilapidated, under-resourced, uncaring, cruel, and brutally unresponsive. It is true as well that many public servants, including teachers, struggle hard to provide services in dismal conditions, and often make a huge difference, but in the majority of cases many make no effort at all, just give up and stay on for a monthly salary paid for minimum effort.
Working and servicing in a developmental state requires a different mindset. We need to answer the twin challenges of creating conditions that maximise the chances of prosperity, while also confronting the challenge of bridging the divide between the two economies.
Adequate skills development provides some of the responses to these challenges. Sadly, skills development is not the entire answer. Consider for a moment a junior manager who has gone through all the preliminary courses in your department. He is faced by the challenge of a retired teacher who is trying to sort out pension queries; she has been trying for 6 months without receiving a pension. Imagine her experience as the manager tells her not to phone again because he won't help her if she keeps on phoning.
Three months later she dies of cold and hunger still without her pension. The junior manager has no knowledge of her death it won't come to his desk, he passed all the courses and is now a middle manager, heading for the top, uncaring, uninterested, unresponsive.
Many managers are like this. The point is whatever skills we seek to develop, it is important to complement them with the necessary values and attitudes. Without the will to provide a service, the knowledge and skills gained from the many training programmes on offer, are only self-serving, maybe a route up a career ladder. At present, South Africa needs basic services of a high quality, delivered to the many who have never had such services.
Unfortunately, too many of our officials have learned only the skills of paper shuffling and meetings, and forgotten the value of providing government services to those who need them. When I hear of teachers turning away children from school because they do not have uniform, I wonder what skill is lacking. When a nurse slaps a patient or neglects another, when pension clerks abuse the elderly, when senior managers are rude to staff, it is not skills development that is lacking it is ethics and values, a new orientation which is in our curriculum today, but not the one used in past decades.
As with every other sector in our country we have found that even in education we face the dilemma of the differentiated and unequal nature of our society and economy. We have agreed that as a sector we need to determine responses that address each of these. Our responses have attempted to consistently reflect a targeted approach, aiming to meet the differential needs of educational institutions within the two economies.
There can be no approach that simultaneously meets the demands of a large township secondary school, a suburban primary, and a one- teacher farm school. A state with a clear development agenda has to devise responses that accurately target need and avoid actions that have the impression of responding while merely pasting over problems, or avoiding a direct and effective response.
In education, some solutions have meant and will mean, for the poor, more quality resources and for the more economically able, increasing self-reliance. Similarly in the public service development should be directed at where the most urgent needs are found. It is vital not to try to do it all at once. Training, therefore, should also be more focussed.
Given recent studies on human resource needs and gaps, we are also increasingly paying attention to the development of scarce skills. South Africa has to focus on developing intermediate skills for our emerging economy - training the artisans, the trades-people, and the technologists. These are the skills we must have if the economy is to grow in a sustained fashion.
All evidence points to manufacturing as the largest growth sector in our economy; it desperately requires people who can fit, who can weld, and who can turn. As we develop these human resources we are starkly aware of the contradictory risks, changing technologies are likely to impact on our success and so cause our new resources to become quickly redundant. We are now alert to the fact that any human resource development strategy must go beyond the narrow bounds of a discipline in order to allow for the development of a broader range of capacities.
This means training in the police service for example, must go beyond detective work and incorporate human rights awareness obligations that the police service would be enjoined to inform and act upon.
For education, this awareness has come to mean much closer sectoral interface in order to seek the emergence of shared development understanding and shared development perspectives. It has also meant that partners are important elements in working for change.
Thus, we are seeing increased parent and community collaboration in education development. This partnership benefits the school, but importantly it also benefits the community. We are alert to the fact that the benefit of educational opportunity will impact most when all who require education and training have access. This has led to the creation of community learning centres out of schools, centres where adults also learn and develop.
The programmes for adult learning focus on sustainable development and encourage communities to actively play a role in steering economic and social development initiatives.
As with transformation at the school level similar attempts at redesigning higher education into a responsive transformed sector are under way. We have two levers that we use to influence the direction of skills development: through the allocation of university subsidies, and with the provision of bursaries through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). In each of these we base our actions on national priorities and encourage institutions to respond as best they can.
From the analysis of scarce skills, it is clear that we require skilling at all levels of the system. Managerial skills are certainly in short supply in the public and private sector. There are also shortages at the technical level and even at the administrative level. Despite the plethora of office management courses, secretarial seminars, and public administration programmes that many of you attend regularly; we are still unable to find enough people who can file a document and retrieve it when required.
Project management, planning and monitoring seem equally scarce. When we are at the school of government lecture hall we appear able to problem solve, to critically analyse and devise creative responses. Once back in the office, faced with a needy client, we pull out ancient rule-books and spend hours detailing reasons why we cannot be creative problem solvers.
This applies as much to the public service as to the rest of the economy. We cannot always find the skills we need for enhanced public service. For example, finding a competent economist for the department has proven extremely tough; these gaps lead us to headhunt from departments and steal away new recruits before they are seasoned public servants. We probably need to review the scope and utilisation of the scarce skills allowance to create room for the public service to compete in terms of scarce skills recruitment.
One of the core issues that those currently in the service must confront is that of leadership in government service. We can no longer rely on old leadership styles, on bureaucratic management from way back. We must foster a leadership that embraces innovation and risk taking as integral parts of daily work. Innovation means trying a new approach after careful assessment and being ready to justify it as relevant to development imperatives.
Many leaders will pull out the PFMA as we mention analysed risk taking. I find this a regrettable reaction, but understand why it emerges. Regrettable, because the reaction contradicts the very purpose and essence of the PFMA, the granting of a greater sense of discretion to senior managers in order for goals to be pursued and achieved. Instead of this goal -directed activity we now have a situation where many managers are frozen into immobility by the fear of stepping outside the boundaries of this act.
We had a recent instance in one province of a head of department, who complained about the need to have three quotes for every purchase. In a rural area, she said, there is only one store - the general dealer- the nearest other shop is 200 km away, how does she secure three quotes? These are some of the challenges to service often posed by policy. A necessary tool may need to more clearly address variation. Some of our training programmes are like this. They fail to build skills; they just provide time out. Strong leaders would be able to determine the form of development programme most necessary to achieving set development objectives.
Responses to a state with the large list of priorities that South Africa has elaborated, requires careful, considered, human resource development. We cannot afford the hit and miss approach. The people of South Africa have great expectations; the public service has to be their primary instrument for realised aspirations. A state committed to development requires human resources able to provide development.
Issued by: Ministry of Education
22 September 2004
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: N Pandor: Senior Management Service Conference
ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, N PANDOR, MP, AT THE SENIOR MANAGEMENT SERVICE CONFERENCE, "BUILDING A DEVELOPMENTAL STATE: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THE TWO ECONOMIES: A PUBLIC SERVICE RESPONSE", Cape Town ICC, 22 September 2004
"SKILLS REQUIREMENTS FOR A DEVELOPMENTAL STATE - A FOCUS ON KEY ROLE-PLAYERS"
Chairperson, senior managers, guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a great pleasure to be with you this morning to contribute to the ongoing debate on how we might improve our national orientation to development. To the many who fought for change in South Africa it may seem strange that "better at development" is still a matter of discussion when we are free. Observers of our country probably assumed we knew exactly what to do when we got the vote, but the challenges are proving somewhat intractable and clearly more able more effective public servants are key to attaining success.
Recent analyses of South Africa's progress in the first ten years have pointed to increased achievement in providing a better life to the people of South Africa, but they also indicate the massive gaps of change and development that we must still confront. One of the most pervasive features of recent analyses is the characterisation of two economies of social and economic activity. All of you would agree that this typology exists within the public service as much as in every other sector.
Many government services tend to be delivered in one of two modes. One is clean and efficient, kind and responsive, uses new technologies, and has the necessary resources. The other is dilapidated, under-resourced, uncaring, cruel, and brutally unresponsive. It is true as well that many public servants, including teachers, struggle hard to provide services in dismal conditions, and often make a huge difference, but in the majority of cases many make no effort at all, just give up and stay on for a monthly salary paid for minimum effort.
Working and servicing in a developmental state requires a different mindset. We need to answer the twin challenges of creating conditions that maximise the chances of prosperity, while also confronting the challenge of bridging the divide between the two economies.
Adequate skills development provides some of the responses to these challenges. Sadly, skills development is not the entire answer. Consider for a moment a junior manager who has gone through all the preliminary courses in your department. He is faced by the challenge of a retired teacher who is trying to sort out pension queries; she has been trying for 6 months without receiving a pension. Imagine her experience as the manager tells her not to phone again because he won't help her if she keeps on phoning.
Three months later she dies of cold and hunger still without her pension. The junior manager has no knowledge of her death it won't come to his desk, he passed all the courses and is now a middle manager, heading for the top, uncaring, uninterested, unresponsive.
Many managers are like this. The point is whatever skills we seek to develop, it is important to complement them with the necessary values and attitudes. Without the will to provide a service, the knowledge and skills gained from the many training programmes on offer, are only self-serving, maybe a route up a career ladder. At present, South Africa needs basic services of a high quality, delivered to the many who have never had such services.
Unfortunately, too many of our officials have learned only the skills of paper shuffling and meetings, and forgotten the value of providing government services to those who need them. When I hear of teachers turning away children from school because they do not have uniform, I wonder what skill is lacking. When a nurse slaps a patient or neglects another, when pension clerks abuse the elderly, when senior managers are rude to staff, it is not skills development that is lacking it is ethics and values, a new orientation which is in our curriculum today, but not the one used in past decades.
As with every other sector in our country we have found that even in education we face the dilemma of the differentiated and unequal nature of our society and economy. We have agreed that as a sector we need to determine responses that address each of these. Our responses have attempted to consistently reflect a targeted approach, aiming to meet the differential needs of educational institutions within the two economies.
There can be no approach that simultaneously meets the demands of a large township secondary school, a suburban primary, and a one- teacher farm school. A state with a clear development agenda has to devise responses that accurately target need and avoid actions that have the impression of responding while merely pasting over problems, or avoiding a direct and effective response.
In education, some solutions have meant and will mean, for the poor, more quality resources and for the more economically able, increasing self-reliance. Similarly in the public service development should be directed at where the most urgent needs are found. It is vital not to try to do it all at once. Training, therefore, should also be more focussed.
Given recent studies on human resource needs and gaps, we are also increasingly paying attention to the development of scarce skills. South Africa has to focus on developing intermediate skills for our emerging economy - training the artisans, the trades-people, and the technologists. These are the skills we must have if the economy is to grow in a sustained fashion.
All evidence points to manufacturing as the largest growth sector in our economy; it desperately requires people who can fit, who can weld, and who can turn. As we develop these human resources we are starkly aware of the contradictory risks, changing technologies are likely to impact on our success and so cause our new resources to become quickly redundant. We are now alert to the fact that any human resource development strategy must go beyond the narrow bounds of a discipline in order to allow for the development of a broader range of capacities.
This means training in the police service for example, must go beyond detective work and incorporate human rights awareness obligations that the police service would be enjoined to inform and act upon.
For education, this awareness has come to mean much closer sectoral interface in order to seek the emergence of shared development understanding and shared development perspectives. It has also meant that partners are important elements in working for change.
Thus, we are seeing increased parent and community collaboration in education development. This partnership benefits the school, but importantly it also benefits the community. We are alert to the fact that the benefit of educational opportunity will impact most when all who require education and training have access. This has led to the creation of community learning centres out of schools, centres where adults also learn and develop.
The programmes for adult learning focus on sustainable development and encourage communities to actively play a role in steering economic and social development initiatives.
As with transformation at the school level similar attempts at redesigning higher education into a responsive transformed sector are under way. We have two levers that we use to influence the direction of skills development: through the allocation of university subsidies, and with the provision of bursaries through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). In each of these we base our actions on national priorities and encourage institutions to respond as best they can.
From the analysis of scarce skills, it is clear that we require skilling at all levels of the system. Managerial skills are certainly in short supply in the public and private sector. There are also shortages at the technical level and even at the administrative level. Despite the plethora of office management courses, secretarial seminars, and public administration programmes that many of you attend regularly; we are still unable to find enough people who can file a document and retrieve it when required.
Project management, planning and monitoring seem equally scarce. When we are at the school of government lecture hall we appear able to problem solve, to critically analyse and devise creative responses. Once back in the office, faced with a needy client, we pull out ancient rule-books and spend hours detailing reasons why we cannot be creative problem solvers.
This applies as much to the public service as to the rest of the economy. We cannot always find the skills we need for enhanced public service. For example, finding a competent economist for the department has proven extremely tough; these gaps lead us to headhunt from departments and steal away new recruits before they are seasoned public servants. We probably need to review the scope and utilisation of the scarce skills allowance to create room for the public service to compete in terms of scarce skills recruitment.
One of the core issues that those currently in the service must confront is that of leadership in government service. We can no longer rely on old leadership styles, on bureaucratic management from way back. We must foster a leadership that embraces innovation and risk taking as integral parts of daily work. Innovation means trying a new approach after careful assessment and being ready to justify it as relevant to development imperatives.
Many leaders will pull out the PFMA as we mention analysed risk taking. I find this a regrettable reaction, but understand why it emerges. Regrettable, because the reaction contradicts the very purpose and essence of the PFMA, the granting of a greater sense of discretion to senior managers in order for goals to be pursued and achieved. Instead of this goal -directed activity we now have a situation where many managers are frozen into immobility by the fear of stepping outside the boundaries of this act.
We had a recent instance in one province of a head of department, who complained about the need to have three quotes for every purchase. In a rural area, she said, there is only one store - the general dealer- the nearest other shop is 200 km away, how does she secure three quotes? These are some of the challenges to service often posed by policy. A necessary tool may need to more clearly address variation. Some of our training programmes are like this. They fail to build skills; they just provide time out. Strong leaders would be able to determine the form of development programme most necessary to achieving set development objectives.
Responses to a state with the large list of priorities that South Africa has elaborated, requires careful, considered, human resource development. We cannot afford the hit and miss approach. The people of South Africa have great expectations; the public service has to be their primary instrument for realised aspirations. A state committed to development requires human resources able to provide development.
Issued by: Ministry of Education
22 September 2004
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