S Moloto: Limpopo Senior Management Service Summit

29 March 2007

Programme director,
Executive Mayors and Mayor,
Director General,
Heads of Department,
Members of our Senior Management Service,
Dr Elijar Maswanganyi,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen

This second Senior Management Service (SMS) Summit of our provincial
government provides us with a unique platform to once again evaluate and assess
our performance in relation to the mandate our people have given us. It is an
opportunity we must maximally utilise to identify the challenges in the public
service and develop viable mechanisms to respond to these challenges.
Underpinning this summit it's a responsibility to determine how far we have
gone in making public service sensitive and responsive to the needs and
aspirations of our people.

The past two and half years of the current term of office saw us hard at
work to improve administrative systems in order to enhance service delivery
capacity of our government. We fully acknowledge the commitment and the hard
work many of you have demonstrated over this period of time. It is common
knowledge that our people rely on your expertise and knowledge to improve their
lot and there can be no doubt that their wellbeing and welfare is firmly placed
in your hands.

It is a widely held notion that a senior management echelon of government
anywhere in the world; has the propensity and potential to break or shape the
development of its citizens. This is why we have accorded you the necessary
status you deserve and have also given you the tools you need to carry out your
designated functions. Our immediate and pressing mandate as government
therefore, is to build an SMS machinery that must be best placed to respond
adequately to the challenges of underdevelopment, unemployment and poverty in
the province and the country as a whole. As in previous occasions, we naturally
expect this summit to go in great length in developing a framework and action
plans for the implementation of the State of the Nation and the Province
addresses. In doing this, the summit will be giving concrete meaning and
expression to the key objectives of:

* the Provincial Growth and Development Strategy (PGDS)
* the National Spatial Development Initiative (NSDI)
* the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (AsgiSA)
* the broader electoral mandate of the ruling party
* the United Nation Millennium Development Goals.

Programme Director

We are proud that our public service has gained phenomenal experience over
the last 13 years of its existence and there are many achievements scored in
many fronts. Apart from the visible delivery of water, electricity and road
networks in many of our communities, we have also made significant inroads in
the area of social wage. The no-fee schools and the improved management of
social security grants cannot go unnoticed.

However, while these has been done, we continue to see the need for the
integration of all government social intervention measures, like credible
allocation of Reconstruction and Development Programme houses and indigent
provision of basic services from municipalities such as potable water,
electricity and sanitation. This we must do to ensure that our people enjoy
integrated services at one government point.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The other major achievement worth emphasising is with regard to the issue of
gender and disability representation in the public service. Employment equity
in the province has improved tremendously over the last few years. Thirty five
percent of our SMS members are women. We have also reached the required two
percent targets of people with disabilities in the public service. It is also
encouraging that all departments have reached and are above the 30% required
target of women representation. However, with the equity target for female SMS
now having been raised to 50% by 2009, we plan to fast track our current equity
employment target to reach 40% SMS female employment and 2,4% disabled
employees by the end of 2007/2008 financial year.

Programme director,

As we all know, we have good legislations and policies in place. However,
the challenge remains the inability on the part of the public servants to
implement. The challenges that we have seen include the poor delivery of
services, under-spending, lack of skilled personnel, integrated planning and
above all, monitoring and evaluation of government programmes. Of particular
note is the "silo" mentality within and amongst government departments and
spheres.

This mentality stems largely from a tendency by senior managers to protect
their comfort zones and to defend their turfs, while at the same time doing
nothing to ensure that services are delivered and that government gets value
for its money. In many instances we have seen this tendency contributing to
duplication including the delays in the adjudication of tenders and sometimes
even wastage of much needed government resources.

The delays in the implementation of provincial flagship projects for
instance, could be attributed to poor intergovernmental relations and the lack
of integration in the work of our senior managers. We are also aware that
skills gaps at this level of management contribute to the weak capacity of the
state. This week our Deputy President published a list of the Joint Initiative
for Priority skills Acquisition (JIPSA) skills which our country will need in
order to half unemployment and to reduce poverty by 2014.

Amongst the skills she mentioned include; planning and managerial skills for
health and education sectors which are deemed as absolutely necessary for
meeting the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa (AsgiSA)
goals. Those in the Department of Education will appreciate the poor
supervisory and management capacities in various circuit offices and schools
which are contributing to the downward spiral in matric results. However, what
is disturbing in some of the cases is that, both the provincial administration
and our municipalities continue to opt for the appointment of less qualified
officers, even when people with appropriate skills are available.

Programme Director,

Conflict of interest within the public service is another challenge we need
to deal with. While traditionally it was only about nepotism and the illegal
acceptance of gifts and hospitality, it has now reached crisis proportions
whereby public officials have private business interests in the form of
partnerships, shareholdings, board membership, investments and even government
contracts. This in our view is tantamount to serving two masters at the same
time because of the likelihood of officials being unduly influenced when making
decisions in their public capacity. Examples of this kind of self-dealing would
include the awarding of contracts or tenders to a company which the public
official owns or derive some benefit.

Another one would include an instance where an official approves a tender
for a particular company with the knowledge that one day when leaving the
public sector he or she will get a job at that particular company for which the
tender was granted. The Public Service Commission (PSC) has recently released a
report on Managing Conflicts of Interest in the Public Service and we hope to
engage with it in reducing these practices. We have learned from our past
experiences that disclosure forms and other policy interventions alone can
never be sufficient to end this challenge, as it remains an area largely left
upon the conscience of an individual to exercise judgment, within the set
parameters of the law.

Programme Director,

In the same vein, we believe that there is also a need for us to ensure that
our Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) is strengthened and not open for
abuse. There are concerns that our system is not transparent enough and makes
it easier for managers to manipulate the three quotation system in order to
give tenders to their kin. This summit must look at this and provide viable
solutions.

Under-spending on the other hand remains another challenge we all need to
address. In fact, there has been a growing acknowledgement in recent years from
many quarters especially Executive Council (EXCO) that, our main challenge is
no longer the absence of resources but the inability to expend public resources
for the benefit of our people. Our only conclusion is that the reason any
senior manager would fail to spend money allocated to him or her, when they
have business plans, is simply that they are not doing their work.

Over the years, the expenditure trends of conditional grants have been
uneven across provincial departments and municipalities. There have been some
good examples of improvement in terms of spending and in other instances of
poor capacity to spend. What makes matters worse is that our municipalities
have so far spent only less than 50% of the allocated Municipal Infrastructural
Grants (MIG), which is happening in the face of serious infrastructural
backlogs in education, health, roads, water and electricity delivery.

In fact, we have become accustomed to many provincial departments using this
period of the end of the financial cycle (the March spike) to dump monies they
could not spend during the course of the year especially on things such as;
vehicles, furniture and wasteful conferences. While government is doing
everything possible to strengthen the capacity of municipalities to spend their
conditional grants, you may all be familiar with the fact that national
government has now adopted stringent measures of reallocating grants from
poorly spending municipalities and redirecting them to municipalities which
have demonstrated capacity to spend. This may well be a good punitive measure,
which may serve to awaken under-spending municipalities to start spending
monies for the benefit of their communities.

Programme Director,

Youth development is another imperative which all departments and
municipalities must embrace without question. We are aware that many of you are
not doing enough to mainstream youth development programmes and initiatives in
departments and municipalities as you should. We wish to task this summit to
look deeper into this question and provide the relevant way forward in
addressing this overarching challenge.

We must leave this summit with a renewed sense of loyalty to government and
the commitment to serve. The challenge of fighting poverty and unemployment
demands of us to be united in action to combat these social ills. In this
regard, we must neither spare time nor effort in ensuring that these
over-aching goals of the PGDS are realised.

We must therefore strive to build a clean and efficient public service that
will serve our people with diligence and integrity. We hope and trust that you
will emerge from this conference clearer and united on the immediate challenges
facing the public service and our people as a whole. We wish this summit well
in its task of exploring solutions for the benefit of our province and the
country at large.

I thank you

Issued by: Office of the Premier, Limpopo Provincial Government
29 March 2007