Today, we are pleased to finally release the green paper on performance, monitoring and evaluation for public comment and discussion. The green paper paves way for our single and a much focused desire to deliver on our mandate to the people of South Africa. The paper describes a process that ensures that we translate our mandate into a very clear set of outcomes and a few crucial output measures that will help us deliver on our commitment. The paper has been put together after long and elaborate discussions and consultation to come up with agreed outcomes and an approach to measure our performance.
Since the establishment of the ministry a lot of questions have been asked about our mandate and the capacity of government to monitor its own performance. Today we outline in our paper titled improving government performance our approach and the process we will follow in delivering on our mandate. We also call on society and the country to participate in a process of consolidating this mandate.
The establishment of the ministry is a clear demonstration of commitment by this government to ensure that we have an outcomes based performance that makes meaningful impact in the lives of our people.
The paper recognises that while we have made many advances since 1994 and while we have improved access to basic services, the outcomes we have produced have often been below standard. Massive increases in expenditure on services have not always brought the results we wanted or our people expected.
We need to understand and accept why we have too often not met our objectives in delivering quality services. The reasons vary from amongst others lack of political will, inadequate leadership, management weaknesses, inappropriate institutional design and misaligned decision rights. The absence of a strong performance culture with effective rewards and sanctions has also played a part.
While building on work already done, we need to focus more on positive outcomes as we use our time, money and management. We are concerned with what we have identified as priority areas: education, health, safety, economic growth with the creation of decent jobs and rural development. We believe that if we deliver and achieve desirable outcomes on these priorities in a focused manner we will make a meaningful impact.
To assist us in focusing on a few things and getting them to work better the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) has identified ten priorities that we believe will place South Africa on a new developmental path.
To be fully effective we chose five priorities that include rural development, health, education, safety and jobs. Collectively these five priorities constitute over 60 percent of our budget so we must derive value from them.
Our task is not to police performance but to facilitate a focus on the government’s mandate and ensure the attainment of concrete positive outcomes. This will involve facilitating a process through which the Cabinet and the other spheres of government agree on outcome and output targets. We recognise that this approach will require principled and firm leadership, making tough choices and holding people accountable for delivery.
To assist us achieve our goals we recommend the creation of a delivery unit to respond to a few carefully selected areas of blockages in delivery. It will partner the appropriate delivery institutions in working towards a turn around. More importantly its interventions would create models for improving delivery that can be followed by others. The delivery unit would consist of a small team of experienced officials who can facilitate change at national, provincial or local level.
The unit will analyse failures in delivery and lessons from successes. In partnership with all relevant role players, it will identify at most five areas where it will partner with the political head and officials to drive change that brings significant and sustained improvements in delivery.
The ministry will identify a limited number of delivery requirements which will be monitored periodically and serve as the basis of engagement between the President and Ministers or groups of Ministers and MECs. The delivery requirements will be set out in a performance letter from the President to a Minister, group of Ministers or sector including the MECs. Report-back meetings with the President every six months will evaluate progress and provide guidance on how to overcome obstacles to delivery.
The historical shortcoming is that we have developed sound plans and policies, but not effective implementation plans (resources inputs, budgets, roles and responsibilities, performance measures and indicators and lines of accountability). The delivery agreement will ensure a focus on implementation plans.
We will develop a set of outcome and output measures for all of government but the focus in the initial period will be on the strategic priorities identified in the MTSF.
We hope to have finalised all our performance requirements by the end of the year. In this regard, the PM&E function will work very closely with its planning counterpart.
We are convinced that this focused approach of measurable outputs and outcomes will improve the quality of life of all the people of our country, especially the poor.
Enquiries:
Harold Maloka
Cell: 082 847 9799
Issued by: The Presidency
4 September 2009
