Service Excellence Awards
23 November 2006
Why are we doing this? Why is it important that government gathers like this
to give awards to itself for service excellence? Is this an exercise in which
we boast, in which we are vain and glorious, in which we pat ourselves on the
back? Is this an exercise where we find an excuse to gather the most glamorous
people of the Western Cape, have dinner with them and really enjoy
ourselves?
I think the motion of service excellence comes about as a tribute to people
who are more often maligned, who are more often criticised, who are judged by
the worst of examples rather than the finest of effective and hard-working
people in the public sector. So tonight is an opportunity to say that the
overwhelming majority of public servants are people who get on with their jobs,
they come to work early, they leave late at night, they take their worries home
with them, they think all the time about how they can do their jobs better and
these people should not be judged simply by the worst examples where the system
seems to fail people. More importantly, they increasingly have to do their work
with growing needs and with fewer and diminishing resources This literally
means that they have to tap into their own internal resource of creativity, to
see how they can do their jobs better under difficult circumstances. And it is
a reward for those who do that, who tap into their own creativity to deliver
services excellently to our people.
Our country has a multiplicity of challenges, but one of the defining
challenges of our country is poverty. Apartheid has not only deprived our
people of resources - of houses, of health facilities, of education, and so on
- but apartheid has also broken our people. We don't only face the challenge of
quality service delivery, but we also face the challenge that with every act of
service delivery we also need to restore the dignity of our people because, had
apartheid simply taken resources from some people and accumulated it amongst
other people, maybe it would have been an easy task to just equalise these
resources. That, by itself, is a difficult task.
What apartheid has also done, is that in the process of disadvantaging most
and advantaging some, it has impaired the dignity of all our people, whether
you were a beneficiary or whether you were a victim. This dehumanisation of
this oppressive system has also had a dehumanising effect on the public sector.
You can't administer a wrongful system without being dehumanised at the same
time. And so when we come together to reward service excellence we also lay
down a measure of how far we have moved to restore the human values in public
servants themselves because you cannot give what you do not possess. You cannot
be a dehumanised public servant having had to administer a dehumanising system
and then suddenly in democracy, be able to speak with the full confidence of
humanity and dignity and begin to deliver services in a humane way.
You cannot come from a fragmented public service where in the house of
representatives you did one thing, and in the house of delegates you did
another thing, in this Bantustan you did this and in another Bantustan you did
that and suddenly be standard bearers for unity and cohesiveness in society.
Public Servants themselves were the product of fragmentation � they
administered a fragmented system, they were fragmented amongst themselves, they
were made to feel inferior or superior to each other. And so when we come
together to reward service excellence and to reward Batho Pele, we also do so
as a measure of how far we have moved to building a representative, a united
and a cohesive public service in the Western Cape and we can indeed say that we
have made great strides, therefore forging unity amongst our public servants
and spreading the message of unity amongst all our people.
So this fragmented public sector is one that I think in the Western Cape
(WC) we have begun to come together. We are beginning to build the basis for
cohesion. The fact that we wonder and worry about how we will get different
departments to work together is a delicious problem compared to what we were
faced with when different administrations had to work together. And so tonight
is a celebration of the fact that we are hard on ourselves about different
departments working together and different pyramids within departments working
together, compared to what we were facing a few years ago when we had to unite,
for example, five different health systems, or four different education systems
within one province.
The fact that education, for example, is able to show off like this today,
says that it is possible for team building to happen within those departments
because now we have a single department that everyone adheres to.
And tonight is also a signal that transformation is not a one-dimensional
thing because, often when we speak about transformation, the first and dominant
thing that comes to mind is colour transformation. I think that is one of the
most effective ways in which we have transformed the Western Cape government.
This government looks significantly different today compared to what it looked
like three or four years ago. We now don't have the heavy problem of under
representivity of some groups at some levels in the public service. We now have
the natural and delicious challenge of how to manage diversity within this
government. It's not now any longer that we don't have a diversity problem
because we all look the same or talk the same or because we come from the same
backgrounds. We now have the delicious problem of having to manage the
diversity amongst us, and that, I think, is a far better problem than under an
under-representative provincial administration.
We did not make this administration representative through malice, through
bloody-mindedness. I think what we have been able to do is to unite the best of
those who were there with the best of those we brought in. We did not in any
way compromise on issues of excellence, on issues of merit. We were able to
show that by bringing in people of colour we were not weakening the
administration. In fact, we were strengthening it and I think the creativity
that we've seen with these projects is precisely because people of different
cultures, educational backgrounds and disciplines have come together to create
the right atmosphere and to create a product that is more creative than what
comes from mono-cultural organisations and institutions. That is part of why we
are celebrating with these awards.
We said that our vision in the Western Cape is a 'Home for All' This Home
for All that we want to create is not a simple call to rainbowism of people of
different backgrounds, colours and languages simply co-existing. What we are
saying is that the essence of a Home for All is inclusiveness and
participation, and when we are saying that all these projects that we reward
are projects that have to make sure while we deliver services excellently and
effectively, they must also bring people together so that they live out this
idea of a Home for All. But a Home for All will only be spin, if it is not
underpinned by the provincial strategy for growth and development, that which
we call Ikapa Elihlumayo (the cape that we grow and share) because the WC is
one of the most unequal societies in the country and we need to make haste,
both in uniting people but also in making our society a lot more equal � that
is the only way that we will make our province sustainable.
These projects have to be underpinned by both our vision of a Home for All
and our growth and development strategy, 'IKapa Elihlumayo.' The 13 projects
that we are honouring tonight are projects that enhance our understanding of
Western Cape government as a developmental state, a state that intervenes in
society, where its public servants are change-agents. We are therefore coming
to reward people who have tapped into themselves and found creative means in
order to deal with greater needs with fewer resources.
We are hoping that all departments of the WC will be inspired by what they
have seen tonight and by those 13 examples of what is possible if you really
put your mind to doing things better and doing things differently. We don't
want this to be something that people do for rewards annually, but as a part of
our culture in the Western Cape Government.
Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
23 November 2006
