B Mabandla: Leadership Conference

14 July 2006

Programme Director
Deputy Chief Justice, Dikgang Moseneke
Deputy Minister, Johnny De Lange
Director General, Menzi Simelane
Chief Operations Officer, Dr Khotso De Wee
Distinguished guests
Senior Members of the Department
Ladies and gentlemen

It is a great pleasure for me to join you, the senior management corps of
the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, here today at this
important Leadership Conference. We, as the Executive, appreciate your personal
efforts towards greater professional service in order to create a better life
for all the people of this country.

I am therefore pleased to note that your discussions over the next two days
will revolve around a number of issues important to all the people of South
Africa, and relating to our constitutional mandate. You will also focus on the
attended challenges and opportunities that face us in our efforts to facilitate
enhanced access to justice, transform justice services, transform the judiciary
and forge strategic linkages and integration. The challenge, for all of us as
the leadership of this department, is to ensure that we come up with tangible
solutions that would vastly improve the service that we render to the
public.

Ladies and gentlemen

The people of South Africa have great expectations. Our people have
expectations for a better life for all. They have expectations that this better
life for all will be realised through the provision of good public services.
Clearly, for us to meet these aspirations we need to ensure that we are
effective in the delivery of key services, such as access to effective, speedy
and reliable justice services and facilities. Access to justice services
entails more than just the issue of legal representation in formal court
proceedings, but the notion is also about the nature of services that citizens
and their communities receive when using justice facilities. It is about
language, gender and victim support measures as well. Many of the Department’s
programmes, such as, an effective maintenance system and other key services, if
administered properly, have the potential to contribute significantly to
poverty alleviation and to the protection of vulnerable groups.

However, to achieve this, and as effective leaders, you need to get the
buy-in of those that you manage. To the public it is the frontline staff, and
not the leadership gathered here today, that is the face of the Department of
Justice and Constitutional Development. It is the officials that pay-out
maintenance monies and the clerks in our courts that constitute the face of the
department. It is therefore extremely important that officials of this
department, naturally the first point of contact between the public and the
justice system, should also conduct themselves and carry out their duties in a
professional, yet sensitive manner to the needs of the public. Sound Leadership
is therefore essentially about gaining the confidence, trust, cooperation,
commitment and support of our staff.

If we are to fulfil the maxim of Batho Pele in the public service, it is
essential that we ensure that we create conducive conditions for rendering an
effective public service delivery. In the first decade of our democratic
government, we were seized with the important task of democratising all
institutions of government. We have made progress in transforming the old
institutions of government that we inherited. In this regard, we made major
departures from apartheid bureaucracy and ensured that resources of the country
would benefit all citizens, without regard to colour, creed, race or gender. We
have also gone a long way in creating new institutions designed to give full
effect to our transformation agenda. However, like in many other societies in
transition throughout the world, there are challenges. Democracy brought with
it new responsibilities and challenges in transforming a justice system that
had been designed to serve the needs of a small minority, to one that extended
services to all the people of South Africa. Unfortunately there is very little
consideration given to this challenge in many public debates.

Ladies and gentlemen

It is a fact that the political leadership of this country relies on the
administrative leadership for the fulfilment of the imperatives for service
delivery. Senior Managers are charged with the task of leading the
implementation of decisions of government. The state’s ability to discharge its
mandate to the citizens of this country is therefore, intricately linked to the
collective performance of Senior Managers in the various government
departments. As custodians of this country’s pioneering Constitution, the
department’s leadership is tasked with ensuring that the rights enshrined in
the Constitution are translated into practical and measurable outcomes that
impact positively upon the lives of all, especially the poor and vulnerable.
And that is why we are here today to review the department’s Medium-Term
Strategic Framework (MTSF) so that we can enhance our service delivery.

In his State of the Nation Address in parliament early this year, President
Mbeki outlined the evidence, notwithstanding the challenges, of a growing
optimism in our country among all South Africans. President Mbeki stated that
the people of this South Africa are convinced that we have entered our ‘Age of
Hope.’ Now an ‘Age of Hope’ can only be realised by the majority of citizens if
the people of this country, can access and receive their constitutionally
guaranteed and indeed, much needed services. That our people have hope is based
on their general experience of a better life that is founded on government
services that they have been receiving since the advent of democracy in
1994.

Clearly then, this means that you, as the senior leadership of this
department, are critical in ensuring that people’s hopes are not misplaced. The
department’s leadership has a key role to fulfil in the realisation of this
hope that the President referred to.

The effective delivery of services also requires that we build our interface
with various stakeholders, including through strengthening and creating
platforms and processes of interaction to ensure that our policies and services
are indeed relevant to the needs of our stakeholders.

Ladies and gentlemen

Because leaders have the most crucial role to play with regard to the
achievement of institutional objectives, the effective monitoring of their
performance and competency levels should therefore be accorded a very high
priority. The effective monitoring of performance should provide valuable
information on institutional successes or failures and draw attention to areas
where urgent intervention is required.

In the 2002/03 Citizen Survey Report, the Public Service Commission
Chairperson Professor Stan Sangweni observed that: “A critical dimension of any
performance measurement system is an assessment of the satisfaction levels
amongst citizens to whom the service is delivered. Service providers have a
tendency of deciding or assuming how citizens want services to be delivered to
them, and what citizens expect from service delivery. These assumptions create
dangerous situations, as gaps between service use expectations and actual
service delivery are not determined.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we need to close these dangerous gaps by giving
meaning to the Batho Pele initiative and fulfilling our constitutional mandate
to the people of South Africa.

I wish you well in your deliberations over the next two days.

I thank you

Issued by: Department of Justice and Constitutional Development
14 July 2006