Thank you very much DG,
Premier,
MECs,
Distinguished public servants
Good Morning.
I must indicate that we used up luck and fruit, so as per the Auditor-General‘s report the presentations this days are actually quite fruitless. Part of what I would like to do with you this morning is to offer an opportunity for us to reflect on what we do and to reflect on the quality of public services that we render.
Because, regardless of what we might think about what we are required to do, the Constitution actually sets for us a very important task that limits the options about whether or not we perform. Now if we look at the preamble to our Constitution, I am raising this because it is very important that we never forget who we are and where we come from and what the requirements are that have been imposed on us.
We look at the preamble to our Constitution, it requires of us to heal the divisions of the past; and that means something very particular when we render public services. It asks of us to lay the foundation on open society where all South Africans are equally protected by law. It asks that we improve on the quality of life of each citizen and free the potential of each person. I think when we look at the public services, that jumps out from the preamble perhaps more than the others.
How do we raise the quality or the living standards of each South African? How do we free the potential of each? What measures do we want to we want to use? How tough are we on ourselves? And then it asks to build united South Africa, capable of taking its rightful place in family the of nations.
So if we go to the Constitution the die in many ways is cast. If you look at those clauses in the preamble, each one of them, is strong, it is an active verb. You cannot build by sitting and watching. You cannot lay the foundation unless it requires some active energy on your part. You cannot free the potential of every South African unless there are a set of active steps and I am saying to you that the measure for all those active steps is in the quality of public services we render.
But the Constitution does not stop there, because in the founding provisions it also places an emphasis on values, human dignity, fundamentally important value, and then the Bill of Rights. We understand that the Bill of Rights, in the main, is on the rising floor; but it is up to the quality of our public services to determine whether that floor rises and the rate at which its rises.
And so, if we are true to those values, it becomes important that a gathering like this takes nothing for granted, engages with what we do, how we do it and seeks a measure for what we do in the lives of our people.
Having said that, I want to, as usual, be provocative.
Madam Premier, many of us, all of us in this room are part of an elite in this country. Each one of us earns a very good salary; we are part of probably the top 5% of earners in this country. That places us in a very different position to the majority of people in this country. So what we have done, all of us, to varying degrees, is to opt out of public services. Even out here I have seen that GEMS is advertising so that we have medical aid; we do not use public facilities.
We do not know what queues are, we do not understand the difficulties that confront people when they go to public health facilities. Many of us who have children may be in a position where we can afford to put our children, if not in private schools, in top model C schools. So we do not know what is happening in township schools. We are in a position where we can afford a decent housing, and so we live in communities that are different from where the majority of people are.
We grew up in townships and we opted out of those townships for a whole host of reasons. And in some parts of Gauteng where we live, we do not actually know much about policing because there are these vans drive around and see that we are safe.
Those of us gathered in this room, the elite of Gauteng, have opted out public services and this places us in a very difficult position because it is a first hurdle that we have to cross; because we need to be able to sense the quality of services that we render. How do we do it if we do not know? I am not raising this to be judgmental of yourselves. I live in Gauteng, I do all of these things; I also to a large extent have opted out. So how do we deal with these issues?
The second issue is that frequently there is a gap between public representative and public servants. MEC Creecy was saying to me: we do the dreaming, you have to implement. And that is part of it!
But you know what is likely to happen, with an election just a few months away, those of us who are paid to do the politics frequently make commitments that are very difficult to meet. Elections are bad because we tend to throw rationality overboard, yellow blog make pronouncements we need to out-pronounce them; and if others come along and if some people with red berets, we need to out-pronounce them.
Then the public servants are saying: how are we going to implement these commitments that have now been made? So part of what we need to do is to focus on how we bring these issues together. I have looked at some other countries and one of the issues that is strong in the Westminster tradition is public servants are durable.
Durable public servants have particular set of tasks. In the period such as we live through now, on the eve of an election, what these public servants do is to take the manifestos of all the parties and, under the responsibility of head of the public service, they draw up these various plans. In the UK, Labour has a red cover, Lib Dems have a yellow cover, the Tories have a blue cover.
The public servants cost the programs as per announcement and these get locked away in a safe. Then when a party wins election, the costed plan is taken out and there is discussion between the public service on the leadership of that party. The others, under control of judges, the other copies are actually destroyed so that people do not talk about them. But that happens when you have public service that is durable and commitments made are actually going to be commitments that can be implemented.
I am saying that these issues, the interrelationship between public service and public representatives, and the quality of public services are a fundamental part of what we should be talking about in this conference.
The Program Director said that I should say something about the National Development Plan. Let me just explain to you the way in which we went about drafting the Plan. Sitting as a first National Planning Commission we realized that it is rather a difficult task; it is a daunting task, where do you start?
You are not the government department; in fact we have this unique position: I sit in government but you have 25 Commissioners who are not in government. What is it that we are going to do? We went back to the Constitution to try and understand what the Constitution says and what it requires of us. We then ask a series of question about what we see.
When we published the diagnostic on the 9 June 2011 it was the observations of National Planning Commission that we laid on the table and we came back and set the objectives. By 2030 we must be able to declare that no South African lives below a poverty line and we can fix that line.
We must fix that line, you can look at Brazil where there is an annual negotiation between government and the private sector on the one hand and unions and NGO’s on the other and they debate on where that line should be. For once you have set that line the commitment should be that nobody should live in abject poverty. Now you can debate to the line that involve the ability to eat out X number of times, should you have a movie, should you have a least be able to hire a DVDs, you can negotiate those things.
But the broad objective that we have set in a plan is that nobody should live in poverty and we can only arrive at that point in 2030 by what we do now. The second issue is harder issue is dealing with inequality.
Inequality is a tough issue even if in the context of development because just over 30 years ago China was exceedingly poor but very equal, China’s Gini coefficient now is 0.464 published by the government in January this year, 0.464. And the US Gini is 0.44 suggesting from the numbers that China is now more unequal than the United States.
So in the context of development, the issue of inequality is a very difficult one. Then we started there, put those issues on the table and then made the observations and we did. Now what is important is in the focus on public service we made a few observations about public services.
We said in the diagnostic that we have no lack of policies. If we put all of the policies together, printed them on A4 sheet, I am sure this country would have produced sufficient policies to move from mean sea level to the moon. We have produced that amount of policies, but we also said that there is a very high policy turnover, we do not have policy stability, and then we said there is a high personal turnover especially among senior staff and technical staff.
I mean we all depend on municipal services, and there are so many municipalities in this country that do not employ an engineer never mind a technician to look after the provision of basic services. We even caricatured some of what we see because what sometimes happens is, there is a Minister of some department, the first thing he does is to say all of the staff who have been here with the previously Minister must be fired then he says the DG and the Deputy DG so on and so on must go.
And then he looks in the village, women are more rational when it comes to these things, he looks in the village, he finds people who can occupy positions because you know how to knot a tie not that they know about the policies. And this kind of thing goes on, and then he throws out the cars that the previous minister uses and brings in his own car.
There is a complete lack of stability about policies and I could regale you for hours with stories about that but you cannot run government on that basis, you cannot even run a village football team if you are changing players all the time and so very importantly especially as we approach the election. How do we ensure that there is stability?
And then how do we within the public service incentivize the appropriate behavior? So once we published the diagnostic, we then moved to into phase two as a National Planning Commission. We consulted on these things, very interesting consultations, primarily with the young South Africans, all political parties and so on.
So then we moved into position of analysing policies, so we say look, the educational outcomes for majority of Black South Africans is suboptimal. What makes it suboptimal? How do you begin the processes of transformation? And so, we look at the policies and try and understand them.
So I can say, that it is not so much a debate about outcomes based educational or learning by rote to this that and the other. Very often it is the interface between teachers and learners. It is the interface between the school and the community. Whether there is accountability, all of those norms become fundamentally important. But the same kinds of issues apply differently across all of our public service.
What the Planning Commission did was to not add more policy issues, here and there raised a few interesting questions, but I think more particularly we asked whether it is possible to push the envelope of where we think we need to be as a country. And if we try and understand the plan that we handed to the President in the joint sitting of Parliament on the 15th of August, it is essentially about trying to push the envelope.
The question that we have to ask of all of us is whether we have, whether we demonstrate a consciousness of understanding where those policy conditions are, and how they relate to the Constitution, and how far we are down the track?
There is a writer some of whose works I find quite inspirational, the writer is called Tony Judt and one of the books he has written is called “Ill Fares Land”; he talks about the value of ideals. So the question that each one of us has to answer for ourselves and for the collective is why am I doing what I am doing?
I would like to believe that broadly, broadly many of us come from the same tradition, would hold the same values dear, and the Constitutional imperatives place us all in more or less the same position. So what Judt writes:
“If you are a rightwing government, things do not need to matter. But for the left, the absence of the historically buttress narrative, leaves an empty space. All that remains is politics, the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election. Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day to day administration of men and things.”
I would like to believe that if it were just about the administration of men and things, then this conference would really be fruitless expenditure. Because I am submitting to you that our Constitution sets that idealism, it creates for us the aspirations and asks of us to perform against the benchmarks that are set for us. And if it is just about getting re-elected next year, if it is just about the day to day administration of men and things, then South Africa’s come to a really very sad point.
So part of what we need to do, Premier, MECs, is to ask what kind of support people need. Now, let me share with you observations I make about the work environment and how that environment supports innovation. And I want to suggest two poles, and mention the first pole.
In mentioning the first pole, I want to paraphrase what I am saying by saying I mean no disrespect in choosing the example. But on that pole for me would be a post office clerk. Somebody who sits behind the desk from 9h00 to 12h45, and comes back at 14:15 sits there until four o’clock. That is the task.
I am saying I mean no disrespect because when I was growing up, the job of a post office clerk was very sort after in the township where I lived. And that person going to work every day what gets them up, what gets them motivated to do what they do? One would think that the arrival of the email poses a threat, and an innovative post office clerk would say how do we adjust the post office to email.
But that does not happen. In fact if there are fewer letters coming through, it makes that person’s life easier. That is the one pole. The other pole is what I saw visiting the Google Campus in Silicon Valley. It is quite an eye opener because the campus is spread over a large area, people answering phones at desks, they sit in groups talking. It looks like they are chilling, but they are actually working intensively.
To get from one part of the campus to another, there are Google bicycles, you cannot take them home. You use them, you leave them. There are signs up advising you to be careful because there are cars driving around, driver-less cars driven by computers. You are never, and this might be a bad idea for our public service, never more than 50 meters from a food station. People go in there, stay in there. Google takes responsibility for your laundry, they will even look after your pets.
What you need to understand is what the value of the output of those professionals are. So for me those are the two poles, because one of the things that public service everywhere is not very good at is innovating. We merely try and do what was done before because we do not put in place that which will measure and drive the change.
Now it is an important point, important observation to make in the context of the National Development Plan because part of what we are doing is to take existing policies and ask how you can close the gap between those policies and the way in which it will impact on the lives of our people. And so, part of what we must have is not a measure of the money that is spent but the output that the money has bought.
The question is: “Is there a consciousness about this?” we have a Constitution that sets a benchmark, we have budgets that determine the resources, and then we have services. One of the questions that has bothered me for a long time is: “Do we have a measure on how much we spend on ourselves as opposed to how much we spend on the people? And can we deal with these issues before we have actually taken the decision, so we do not wait for the Auditor General to determine this for us?”
Part of what we need to be talking about is measurement in management and the way in which these two interface. What are the circles of influence that exist? MEC Creecy, what happens if the school does not perform? Might it be that some teachers are performing and others are not performing? How do we know, how do we drive this program differently because you know, it is fascinating for me to see a school somewhere in Mgwali in the Eastern Cape is in trouble and they blame Angie Motshekgwa. She gets beaten up for everything.
If the results are good there is nothing gained, but she would be beaten up for everything that is wrong. Who helps you MEC Creecy to not look at the grade 12 exam results because I do not want to look at that anymore. I want to look at the ANA results. Are we committed enough to inform parents of what is happening in the lives of their children?
Because I can tell you that if you go to the former model C schools, they would email parents once a week to tell them. But here we have a uniform Annual National Assessment and we do not want to tell parents what is happening in the lives of their children.
It is as though we want to exclude them in spite of the fact that the Schools Act says every school shall have a functioning school governing body. I want to commend you MEC. You have done a remarkable job in training parents to participate in school governing bodies. But we got to drive that program really hard.
What do we do about circles of influence in management in health MEC Papo? It is very difficult. I have watched this long before you became MEC. I listen to you because you know Hope from Berea has always been a feature of radio in Gauteng. Listen to the change through this process and know that there are enormous challenges.
How is it that as Government we adopted a list of essential medicines that need to be in every health facility in the country? Well of course, if you are a teaching hospital, there are some things on that list that must be there. And if you are a local clinic, there is an essential list that looks a bit different and we have adopted that.
And right here in the province, the wealthiest part of the African continent’s health facilities battle to maintain even the essential drugs to deal with chronic ailments that people suffer. We are not talking of extraordinary medicines that may be required for unique diseases. We are talking of that which people need every single month. How do we deal with this issue, what interventions are necessary.
I know that the health department in the province has taken a recent decision about the acquisition of bed linen, but we know that large teaching hospitals do not have bed linen. How do we deal with this issue? I am saying, in the hospitals I go to using my ParMed medical aid, I would be very upset if there is not bed linen. How do we deal with this issue? How do we deal with the state of cleanliness of our health facilities without which you cannot deliver a quality health care?
How do we drive this process for change? Before, I think it was about 2009 Premier, I was invited to conversation with managers in the Department of Health in this province. And one of the things that have been done is in order to get some of the vaccinations going and to maintain ARVs there was a decision taken to maintain a cold chain because you can leave these things lying around; they need to be locked in fridges.
The money was provided and the budgeted; the cold chain was never established. How do we deal with these issues? Who do we hold responsible? How do we construct a broad government that says if you misbehave there are consequences that would be attached?
I could go through every function and raise issues about them, but that is not the purpose of the exercise nor was the purpose of the exercise to pick on Departments of Health and Education. I am merely raising it to ask whether we take the values of our Constitution sufficiently serious to be tough on ourselves because unless we do that, the cynics win the day every time.
You see, Minister Sisulu gets me to trouble. The last time I spoke at The Nursing Conference, I had a lot of trouble thereafter. One of the things is and I do not know if it is the influence of Prof Seepe, we were talking last week and I see she is reading Confucius and Management. Not confusion, Confucius.
And I had to look at this, and the Confucius sets a framework for work ethic, and there are seven elements that he says managers must have in the execution of their duties. The first is hard work, the second loyalty, the third thrift, the fourth dedication, the fifth social harmony, the sixth the love of wisdom, and the seventh social propriety.
We look at China, we admire what they do. A lot of what they do would be driven by those seven principles of a work ethic that comes out of Confucianism. Can we embrace that, can we drive it, can we put it up on our walls, can we look at it, and can we put it up on the mirrors? Sometimes we spend a lot of our times there and ask ourselves every single morning every time we walk past the mirror we check how good we looking. Can we ask about those things as well?
There are a few practical steps I would like to raise so that we can open a discussion. The first is whether we can focus on closing the gap between our representatives and public servants. In all the years of being a Minister I try and meet my Senior Management at least once a fortnight. Risenga Maluleke is here, he is a Deputy DG in Stats SA. He will tell you we have very tough meetings.
I know a hell lot about statistics not because I am a Statistician but I know that unless we are engaged in what they do, and the Stats Act gives me limited powers relative to other government departments but unless we are engaged, I cannot ask of them to conduct themselves in the way that makes a difference. Can we close that gap?
The second issue is: Can we ask in that interaction between political heads and administrative heads to undertake evaluations of policy appropriateness to inform what we do to test and tweak. There is nothing worse than believing that something is happening when it is not. The third issue is do we have measurements from the field? Do we know that teachers are in class on time teaching, no neglective duties, and no abusive of learners? It is a mantra. Do we know that that is happening? What would tell us that it is happening?
Do we know that nurses are nursing? Do we know that police men and women are policing, not collecting cool drink money? How do we know these things? Do we listen to our people before things happen? Do we have channels of communication? Do we take our people seriously even when they are winging at us?
Do we do those kinds of things? Are managers involved in this process saying to the political heads: “MEC Memela is a problem over there, we better watch it? Do not wait for it to hit us via the media.
“And then very importantly in the context of those two poles that I described; between the Post Office on the one hand and Google campus on the other, do we know where we are. Do we know how appropriate what we do is? I want to go back to Tony Judt. He says, he talks about public service, he says, and he asks tough questions about ethics in public service.
He writes: What of well-being? What of fairness or equity in its original sense? What of exclusion, opportunity or its absence or lost hope? Such considerations mean more to most people than aggregate or even individual profits of growth. Take humiliation. What if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to quantify the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life? Who asks these kinds of questions?
Let me end by saying that the challenge for us is in a very graphic way to look at the two poles, to look at the spectrum of public services, to look at what motivates people in what they do and it is not money, it’s a series of other things.
To ask whether we are creating that environment on the spectrum between the clerk in the post office and the people driving innovation on the Google Campus and to ask how we move along that line. I am saying that we do not need to be reticent; people do not expect that of us. We need to push ourselves harder. I said earlier that because I am old, I quote even myself. In 2004 I spoke at an SMS Conference in Cape Town.
What I said then was: Please remember that your enemy is poverty and deprivation, that you key weapon is your skill and professionalism, and that your modus operandi is your humility. You are with us custodians of a value system that defines our objective and demonstrating every single day that we are a caring democracy.
Thank you very much for your patience!
