Good morning ladies and gentlemen,
Introduction
May 7 heralded a new dawn for millions of South Africans with the successful fifth democratic elections that have further reinforced our stable democracy. A new administration has been elected into office with a clear mandate to continue with the implementation of our National Development Plan (NDP).
For the purpose of this briefing I will concentrate on only three issues: Re-inventing how we work as public servants, looking at whether the public service is bloated or not and strengthening our relationship with Provinces.
The National Development Plan asserts that the public service is central to us achieving our objective of improving our people’s lives. To address the triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality the public service needs to play both a transformative and developmental role. To this end, the public service has to re-invent itself to assume this important responsibility. For us to succeed we require a professional and effectively coordinated and managed state institutions with skilled public servants who are committed to serving our people.
I will therefore embark on a national programme, after consulting with Ministers and Premiers, to speak directly to ordinary civil servants about how we can start improving their jobs in order for them to deliver better services to our people. This process will be undertaken during September and October, and will signal the start of a critical task of reinventing how we work as a department and how we work as public servants. However, this is not a short-term task and will require input from all departments, labour, academic institutions and civil society.
A bloated Public Service?
It is important that we deal with recent media articles about the quality of service delivery versus what is perceived to be a bloated public service. These articles have been somewhat mischievously linked to the establishment of new departments and ministries.
This afternoon we will inform the National Assembly that the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) in partnership with other stakeholders including the Presidency and National Treasury has formed a task team to deal with the establishment of new departments. We will do our utmost to ensure that the creation and resourcing of these departments is done in an accountable manner, a manner that will prove the predictions by journalists and political analysts to be unfounded. For this reason, where applicable, we will consider identifying and transferring various units doing related work – and currently existing in other departments - to the newly established departments.
However, where certain professional skills and experience are required we will create the necessary space for departments to source in high quality people to fill those posts. This process will ensure that money is spent on actual service delivery as opposed to adding to our wage bill.
Corruption
When it comes to fighting corruption strong leadership is critical! To this end, we have noticed that the National Anti-Corruption Forum - comprised of civil society, business and government - has not been meeting. As a result the Public Service Anti-Corruption Strategy has not been monitored effectively. For this reason we have already requested the Public Service Commission to immediately convene the Forum.
As a department we are strategically located to create an enabling policy environment to combat corruption. We will also support the implementation of such policies through building effective management capacity within all departments.
In addition we confirm that the department will begin to strengthen relationships and work more strategically with Provincial Premiers and the National Council of Provinces. Our experiences over the past 20 years of democracy have exposed certain challenges that must be addressed. We will therefore become pro-active in order to prevent provinces or provincial departments from being declared section 100 intervention areas as outlined in the Constitution.
We will therefore begin look at establishing an intergovernmental relations structure best suited to identify and monitor issues before they become major crisis. This effort will be based on establishing an effective collaborative partnership between ourselves, the Presidency, the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, National Treasury, Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, the Auditor General and the Public Service Commission.
Enquiries:
Dumisani Nkwamba
Cell: 082 885 9448
E-mail: dumisanin@dpsa.gov.za
