Foreword

South Africa faces a pressing challenge of eliminating the poverty and under-development that afflicts the overwhelming majority of the population. The state has a central role to play in dealing with this problem. The ability of the state to act is largely defined by the capability and commitment of its public service. The challenge of transforming the public service is thus among the central tasks to be achieved if we are to meaningfully address the development challenges facing our country.

Transformation stems from the need to address the profound inequities inherited from the past, the need to meet the moral, social and economic demands of the new South Africa and the challenge of national and international opportunities presented by the pr esent climate of change.

The public service transformation process involves the whole of society, and its success will impact positively on the consumers of services and the broader public. It is for this reason that, in the spirit of Batho Pele ”People First”, debates and contributions to public service transformation should not be limited to specialists, researchers and public servants, but should involve all citizens.

With this report we give key information on the state of the public service at this point. The purpose is to ensure that policy discourse and debates are informed by the actual information rather than perceptions, rumours, and speculation. We hope this will enrich the debates and facilitate the development of appropriate solutions to the problems we are grappling with. We are the first to admit that the quality and the scope of the information we have currently is inadequate. It does however provide a solid beginning. We will be undertaking initiatives in the coming period to improve the quality of the information on the public service.

This report does not only provide information, it also raises the contextual and policy issues that underlie the programmes and debates currently underway. This is not intended to be definitive, but rather to contribute to a continuing discussion on an issue of great magnitude. We hope that this is how the report will be received and understood by all stakeholders.

I must however emphasise that the stakeholders who must be singled out to give particular attention to this report are public servants themselves. They have the particular responsibility to grapple with the issues that the report raises, and to add value t o them. Where decisions and actions are called for, they have the responsibility to act. We are confident that they will prove equal to the challenges and tasks before them.

Minister for Public Service and Administration
Ms G. Fraser - Moleketi

Executive summary

This first "Status of the Public Service" report prepared by the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) fills an important gap in developing an understanding of the structure, workings and challenges faced by the South African public service. It does this by supplementing other government reports, but this time concentrating more on human resource issues, organisation, management practice and service delivery. In the process it is attempting to balance the financial emphasis that is often found in public reports. As such it has the potential to inform and stimulate further discussion and action on the agenda that will drive the transformation of the South African Public Service. The report was prepared, and is presented in the spirit of encouraging learning within the public service - learning from both our successes and failures, and translating these lessons into better practice in years to come.

The report flags a number of key questions that sits at the heart of the future direction that changes in the public service may take. These are open questions, with no obvious answers, although some input to the debate is provided from DPSA side. The overall question that occupies our minds is “What public service are we trying to build?” This breaks down into a number of component questions, such as:

• What strategy, structure and character will the restructuring of the public service assume in the next five years?
• How do we consolidate the progress of the last five years while gearing ourselves for meeting challenges brought about by globalisation and the technological revolution?
• How do we best deepen reforms regarding the modernisation of the public service that we have embarked upon? and
• What further reforms, over and above integration, rationalisation and modernisation should be pursued?

The report raises these questions, and offers some suggestions on the way forward, against the backdrop of:

• an understanding about the complexity and duration of public service transformation, and the interplay between learning from international experience, and ensuring that lessons are thoroughly adapted to the prevailing context;

• a historical and legal overview of the more recent transformational efforts an empirical overview of the structure and composition of the public service, that shows the following main trends:

  - a public that is slowly shrinking and is correcting the balance between units mainly responsible for policy and regulatory activity, and those responsible for direct service delivery;

  - a public service that in part, at least at the most basic level, is approaching representivity. However, scratching below the veneer the continued inequities in the composition of the public service, both in racial and gender terms, are exposed;

  - a public service that shows stark variation when we move away from the public sector as a whole, as a unit of analysis, to either that of provincial administrations and national departments, or when attempting to group various units into sectors;

  - a particularly youthful public service, particularly in its policy making organisational units;

• a review and discussion of issues related to personnel expenditure, paying particularly attention at strategies about how to curb the spiraling cost of personnel related expenditure, in order to release more resources for development related activities; and
• an overview of progress that is being made by the public service to deliver services to a much broadened group of recipients or users, and at the same time attempting to wipe out historical backlogs. This progress is however, also contextualised against remaining challenges.

Lessons that have clearly been learnt in South Africa over the previous five years include the following:

• Time lines for transformation have mostly been over-optimistic;
• Transformation has been tackled in an ad hoc manner, without paying due regard to matters of sequencing, co-ordination and integration;
• Management as a factor in leading successful transformation initiatives has not been adequately recognised;
• The demands brought about by policy overload and the pace of change outstripped the managerial capacity available, and the demands were not matched by initiatives to develop managers - at a variety of levels - for these challenges;
• The public service is generally caught up in crises management, leaving little space for strategic and visionary management to take root in practice;
• The regulatory frameworks are not adequately aligned, nor flexible and sophisticated enough to accommodate most situations without causing distress to a significant grouping of actors regulated by these frameworks;

Problems still exist in terms of an adequate accountability framework within the public service, but also at the bureaucratic - political interface.

POINTERS TO THE WAY FORWARD, AS HIGHLIGHTED IN THIS REPORT, CENTERS AROUND THE FOLLOWING THEMES

• Improving co-ordination of government efforts to transform the public service;
• Improving the monitoring and evaluation capacity on government initiatives;
• Strengthening management capacity;
• Creating frameworks regarding public service organisation and structuring that will allow for both appropriate uniformity and adequate differentiation at the same time;
• Improving quality of service;
• Improving on people management; and
• Maximising the opportunities that technological advances offers for electronic government.

ABBREVIATIONS