Chairperson of the Portfolio on Public Service and Administration
Honourable Members
Minister in the Presidency: Honourable Jeff Radebe
Distinguished guests
Members of the Department’s management and staff present
Members of the media present
Comrades and friends
Ladies and gentlemen
Introduction
We have now entered the second phase of our democratic transition.
This phase will be characterised by robust implementation of government policies and programmes geared towards the achievement of our long goal of the National development Plan-Vison 2030.
Government has declared purposefully its intention to mobilise society in radically transforming the economy to serve the needs, interests and aspirations of our people.
This means that political power and authority that was given to the ANC by the people in the last elections will be used to radically transform our society, and alter ownership and control of the economy.
Our Twenty Year Review comprehensively identified the substantial progress that has been made since 1994 as well as the challenges that confronts us.
Numbers confirm that most of our people have access to houses, electricity, water and sanitation, and social assistance programmes.
This reaffirms governments insistence that the quality of life of our people - since the ANC under Nelson Mandela took over - has radically changed for the better, but more still needs to be done to reverse the damage done over three centuries of colonialism and apartheid.
Every year since 1994 our people continue to enjoy a better life. We will build on that course to take the country forward.
Management performance assessment
Honourable Members, one of the key goals in the NDP is to build a capable developmental state and to forge a disciplined, people-centred and professional public service.
Our role as a department is to monitor and evaluate whether
- our schools have learners who learn and teachers who teach;
- hospitals tends to patients through the capable hands of qualified and committed nurses and doctors;
- municipalities delivers water, electricity and sanitation;
- that our people are humanely settled with adequate basic services and recreational facilities for the youth;
- that the programme for land restitution and redistribution is adequately implemented in an accelerated fashion;
- that women and children feel safe and secure from all sorts of abuse by an adequate policing system;
- that graduates are of the highest quality to serve our country for the better;
- and, that all economic functions and systems of the state are capable of yielding more jobs and supporting more enterprises for the collective prosperity of our nation.
This is by no means a small task. Minister Radebe has been asked to ensure that government works, and works for the people of our country.
We have to continue with the construction of a capable and professional public service characterised by high quality management and practices, free of corruption, and dedicated to ensure a better livelihood for our people.
Since 2011, in partnership with the Offices of the Premier and transversal policy departments such as National Treasury and the DPSA, DPME has been monitoring the quality of management practices in national and provincial government departments.
This is done by carrying out annual assessments of the state of management practices in departments against a set of 30 management standards, covering areas of management such as human resource management and development, financial management and supply chain management, internal departmental governance, planning, monitoring and evaluation and the management of information.
The process involves a self-assessment by the senior management of the department in order for the managers to reflect on their management practices and identify areas where their department is doing well and areas where it needs to improve.
This is followed by internal audit validation and external peer moderation by policy experts drawn internally from government.
The assessment results are presented to Cabinet and the President’s Coordinating Council with the provinces. Our department has also been presenting the results to Portfolio Committees in Parliament, when invited to do so.
For the last two financial years, all national and provincial departments have participated in the assessments. There was some improvement in the results over the past two years, and we look forward to further improvement in this year’s assessment.
The aim of this monitoring initiative is to drive a process of continuous improvement in the quality of management practices in departments.
Accounting officers are guided through improvement plans to address management weaknesses identified in the assessments.
We have found that, for each of the 30 management standards there are at least some departments that are performing extremely well.
The department has in collaboration with Wits University School of Governance, documented case studies for selected standards where departments have performed well.
To date we have developed 35 case studies of good performance, and our department will be arranging knowledge sharing workshops during this financial year to enable all departments to learn from these good practice case studies.
Our department will also continue to monitor a range of indicators of management performance on behalf of the Forum of South Africa Directors General (FOSAD).
These relate to management areas over which Directors-General have control, and which are of concern to citizens, labour, business and Parliament.
They include, for example, reducing waiting times and turnaround times for a range of services, reducing the time taken to finalise disciplinary cases in the public service, the filling of funded vacancies, and the payment of suppliers within 30 days of submission of a valid invoice, a commitment made by the President.
Through this, we believe that we are in course to make government work for its people.
Local Government Monitoring
As with the assessments of the management practices of national and provincial departments, we have developed a similar model for application in municipalities.
This model is called the Local Government Management Improvement Model (LGMIM), which was developed in collaboration with the Department of Cooperative Governance, National Treasury, SALGA, the Office of the Auditor-General, provincial departments responsible for local government and key sector departments such as Water, Sanitation, Energy and Environment.
The aim of our municipal assessments is to measure, monitor and support improved management practices in municipalities for better service delivery.
We are assessing municipalities against standards in six key performance areas; which are (1) integrated development planning, (2) human resource management, (3) financial management, (4) community relations, (5) Governance (6) and the five key service areas of water, sanitation, electricity, refuse removal and roads.
During the last financial year the model was piloted and tested in 12 municipalities, including three cities.
Learning from the pilot phase, the model and approach was refined for implementation in a further 20 municipalities in the current financial year.
Due the limited capacity the department will work with provincial departments of local government to increase the number of municipalities that are assessed, to ensure the accuracy and quality of the assessments and, in developing improvement plans based on assessment results.
We have been encouraged by the interest in and commitment of provinces to this initiative and we are working with them to train officials in the provincial departments responsible for local government to carry out management assessments in municipalities in their respective provinces.
With this level of commitment we expect the assessments to scale up considerably in subsequent periods.
Frontline Service Delivery Monitoring
Honourable Members, one of the aspects of government performance which needs to improve is the quality of service delivery experienced by citizens.
In this regard, in 2011 our department started a programme with the Offices of the Premier to carry out unannounced monitoring visits of frontline service delivery facilities such as social grant distribution sites, schools, clinics, police stations, courts, drivers’ license centres, municipal customer care centres and home affairs offices.
The focus is on assessing aspects of service delivery such as queue management, waiting times, dignified treatment, cleanliness and comfort using structured monitoring tools implemented by trained monitors from our department and the Offices of the Premier.
The results of the monitoring visits are reported to the management of the responsible departments as well as to Cabinet and the President’s Coordinating Council with the provinces.
The responsible departments are requested to put in place improvement plans to address problems identified during the visits.
The main aim of this initiative is to show service delivery departments the potential benefits of monitoring the quality of front-line service delivery and to encourage and support departments to start monitoring the quality of their service delivery themselves.
To date, we have carried out monitoring visits to more than 550 facilities.
This initiative has given us valuable insights into the quality of service that our citizens are experiencing at the frontline and we have been able to work with the responsible departments to introduce many improvements based on the findings of the monitoring visits.
We also go back to some of the facilities that were found to be performing poorly and I can report that 79% of the facilities which were revisited last financial year showed great improvements.
I would like to thank the provincial Premiers, the Offices of the Premier, the relevant Ministers and their departments for their support in this initiative.
This financial year we will conduct unannounced visits to 90 new facilities and we will re-visit 120 facilities to check if the agreed improvements have been implemented.
We encourage our people to let us know which facilities they wish us to prioritise for surprise visit through the Ministry or the Presidential Hotline.
Strengthening people-voice in monitoring
Honourable members, Our people have a key role to play in assisting government to improve its performance and the quality of service delivery.
The NDP calls on our people to be active participants in building a better society.
It states that all spheres of government “can enhance citizen’s participation through a variety of two-way information gathering and sharing forums and platforms between citizens and government.
“While these platforms can enable government to inform (citizens), they also enable citizens to give feedback to government and monitor performance”.
The NDP points out that M&E practices in government “could be enhanced via improving everyday bottom-up mechanisms that enable citizens to communicate their grievances and seek redress at the point of delivery.
“Routine accountability would enable citizens to provide on-going insights into service delivery.”
Last August, Cabinet demonstrated its commitment to strengthening the voice of our people in the monitoring of service delivery, with the approval of the “Framework for Strengthening Citizen-Government Partnerships for Monitoring Frontline Service Delivery”.
Since then, the department has been hard at work to support the institutionalisation of citizen-based monitoring in government.
With the commitment from the senior leadership of the South African Police Service, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Departments of Health and Social Development, over the past year we have been piloting an approach to people-based monitoring of police stations, clinics, SASSA and DSD services.
The piloting in this phase was focussed on Tugela Ferry in Msinga Local Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal and Phuthaditjhaba in Maluti-a-Phofung Local Municipality in the Free State.
With the support of 80 trained Community Works Programme staff, more than 5 000 citizens were interviewed on the performance of Tugela Ferry Police Station, the Church of Scotland Hospital in Msinga, the Phuthaditjhaba Clinic and Police Station, and the two SASSA service centres and pay points in these areas.
We are now working with the departments and community stakeholders to ensure that the information collected from citizens leads to improvement in the quality of service delivery provided in these facilities.
The aim of this initiative is to build the capacity of service delivery departments to regularly obtain the views of citizens as part of their internal service delivery monitoring practices.
Before the end of this financial year we will roll out this initiative in all provinces.
Presidential Hotline
A further way in which government is involving our people in the monitoring of service delivery is through the Presidential Hotline, which is managed our department is managing.
The intention of the Hotline is to contribute to a more accessible and responsive government.
To date, the Hotline has logged more than 190 000 complaints and queries and the resolution rate is 95%.
On behalf of the President and Minister Radebe, I want to take this opportunity to thank all departments, national and provincial, for the efforts they made in addressing the complaints we received.
We are also giving our people the opportunity to rate the service they received from the Hotline – to date we have called 14 750 users of the Hotline and asked them to give feedback on the service.
Of these, 74% rated the overall service from the Hotline as good to fair and 26% rated the service as poor.
Overall, we are proud of these results, but we will be giving each department its own Hotline satisfaction ratings as scored by our people.
Some departments can be very happy with their ratings but there are some which still have a lot of work to do to improve their complaints management.
Recently we documented the story of the Presidential Hotline in the form of a report on the successes and challenges as well as a video where citizens talk about their experiences of the Hotline.
I encourage all of you to view the report and video on our website and contribute positively in making the Hotline to best serve our people.
Siyahlola Presidential Monitoring Programme
In the current financial year the department will also continue to provide support to the President for his Siyahlola monitoring programme, which involves visits to communities together with teams of ministers in order to assess service delivery challenges and to engage with the people, and monitoring of progress with addressing these challenges after the visits.
Through these, those who are elected or appointed to serve our people, should know that the President and government in its entirety will be on the go, keeping them awake, and ensuring that we all justify our daily wage by truly working for our people.
Conclusion
In conclusion honourable members, to improve performance and inculcate a culture of excellence in the public service, we are looking forward to working with Parliament to move our country forward.
I thank you
