Issued by: SA Communication Service
DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS AND TOURISM (DEA&T) PLANNING AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT WORKSHOP INITIATED AND CONDUCTED BY THE DEPUTY MINISTER HON PETER R MOKABA, MP DEAT TRANSFORMATION PROCESS
Cape Town - The first department-wide all-inclusive Strategic Change and Planning Management Workshop of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEA&T) has just been concluded. The Workshop which was held at Mount Amanzi resort near Pretoria from the 12 to 14 May 1997 was initiated and convened by the Deputy Minister Hon. Peter R Mokaba, MP in order to expedite transformation and improve the organisational performance of the DEA&T.
In order for the DEA&T to adequately respond and add to the current processes of the democratization of our country and in order to deliver the Constitutional mandate to deliver to all South African a healthy environment a number of policies have just been completed while many others are still under work in progress. Those concluded include The New Environmental Policy for South Africa which for the first time introduces and lays the basis for the country's integrated environmental management model. Central to this model is the paradigm shift in environmental management from narrow conservationism to sustainable development.
In this connection the policy transforms the DEA&T from a past of playing a passive facilitation role to one of active governance entailing executive monitoring, adjudicative, integration and co-ordination of all environmental management functions across government departments and other levels of government by connection and extension where appropriate. In this way the government has succeeded in bringing together environmental considerations as part of economic and all developmental activities.
Other policies that are concluded are on Biodiversity, Tourism Promotion and Development and Sea Fisheries. The Integrated Pollution and Waste management policy will be concluded and delivered in August. The Environmental Impact Assessment EIA regulations are scheduled to be promulgated at the end of May 1997. While the implementation strategy for tourism has been completed and the first legislation passed there are still 16 more areas requiring policy and strategies which we plan to complete in a matter of months. These include the integration into our national law of all the thirteen international Conventions and Agreements of which we are signatories.
These policies and the ongoing democratization and internationalisation of South Africa means the designing of new programmes as well as the extension of existing ones to cover the hitherto excluded and now disadvantaged Black communities.
All of these require a magnitude of vision, a clear mission, new management styles, new organisational structures, systems and cultures. They require new technologies and new ways of taking advantage of the information technology, systems and management. They require new attitudes and higher productivity levels in the public sector and in particular in the DEA&T. They require a more efficient, effective, innovative, responsive, representative, entrepreneurial and intelligent DEA&T.
Achieving such a DEA&T is the objective of the workshops and processes that the Deputy Minister has initiated. These processes are geared towards stemming to exodus of highly experienced and hard to replace skilled labour from the DEA&T while bringing in, mentoring and promoting to higher echelons of management those previously excluded citizens of our country chief among them blacks and women.
Another aim of this workshop was to enable the staff, both black and white, as a whole to own this process of transformation. In this regard we are pleased to announce that we have discovered great talent and enthusiasm within the department among middle management and others that we have not been aware of previously. It is these individuals that this process seeks to empower and transform from being simple bureaucrats and administrators to managers who are more mission-driven than rule-driven. We have also discovered that as a department that we are world leaders in some of the areas of science we are engaged in as well as overall leaders in Africa in the area of tourism.
There were many other positive achievements at this workshop. Being the first time the various components of the DEA&T are brought together in this fashion since it's inception. We started of the workshop with the discovery that we have never once shared a common vision within the department, and co-ordination so poor, that some directorates really felt that they did not belong while others felt that they were more of "orphans" who have just been attached to the others by an uncaring government that does not appreciate the importance of their work. Yet at the end of the workshop we all left feeling a great sense of belonging and that we are one big family with our chief directorates as simple strategic business units that should, can and are now going to work together as a team.
Demonstrating the urgency and the seriousness of the tasks that we have set for ourselves we immediately set up the beginnings of a transformation unit at the workshop with the instruction that it should be placed at the highest possible level.
I wish to further announce that we have already started the process of budgeting for the changes envisaged so that resources do not delay implementation. A strategy for implementation will soon be worked out and announced. I will also be meeting with the Department and Commission for the Public Service to deal with the matter of staff.
In conclusion, I wish to thank my Minister Pallo Z Jordan for delivering the opening address at the workshop. I also thank Messrs Patrick Fitzgerald, Walter Mbete, Allan Taylor and their team from the Gauteng Public Service Commission for the excellent manner in which they facilitated the workshop and for their continued commitment to help us in the transformation process that will also include our parastatals such as SATOUR, National Botanical Institute and National Parks Board.
I would like to confirm my total commitment to this process and assure both the DEA&T staff and our clients and stakeholders that with this processes environmental management has come of age in our country.
Statement issued by Contact: Muriel Dube Office of the Deputy Minister 021 461 1777 Environmental Affairs and Tourism,