Anton Harber talks to Minister without Portfolio Jay Naidoo
JAY NAIDOO is the official national kibbitzer. In Yiddish, a kibbitzer is the person who looks over your shoulder when you are playing cards and gives you unwanted advice. Naidoo’s job, as minister without portfolio, is to look over the shoulders of every other minister and civil servant and see how they are implementing the reconstruction and development programme.
Don’t they resist this? “I am finding a complete willingness to work with this office. The departments want to deliver (on the RDP), they are desperate to deliver, and we are facilitating this.”
Naidoo has an appropriate office. He sits in the elegant old President’s Council building, looking down over parliament and the other government buildings and alongside Tuynhuis, the office of the president who has given him his new task.
Naidoo is also learning an appropriate new language: interspersed with the usual language of development (consultation, consensus, delivery), he talks about business plans, adding value, fiscal control, change management and even “systematic performance auditing”.
This is the language of a minister grappling with the enormous task of reorienting the goals of 26 government departments, changing the work priorities of millions of civil servants, restructuring the national budgeting system — while getting everyone to agree on how to do it, and without spending any extra state funds.
But Naidoo is cock-a-hoop about progress made in the first 100 days of his task. It’s not so much that the president was able to announce a set of RDP projects ready for implementation, for Naidoo knows most of these were a stroke of luck — projects for which planning had reached the stage where a budgetary allocation was all that was needed to get them going.
More importantly, he says he has been able to put in place the infrastructure for the more complex, more substantial, long-term RDP work: macro-projects like restructuring the economy.
Naidoo had to start his ministry from scratch. He has had to create all the structures and hire all the staff he will need. This has the disadvantage of delay (he has not yet found a spokesman), but the advantage of allowing him to make all his own appointments, and avoid the problems other ministers have had in bringing in their own people.
The slowness in getting provincial and local governments off the ground has created another obstacle to RDP implementation. However, “our first task was to get an infrastructure in place and find exactly what role I and this office will play in relation to the implementation of the RDP. And then we had to get agreement on that within the cabinet and with the provinces. We have achieved that,” he says.
It started with a special cabinet committee of all the ministers involved in the RDP. Since that was hardly smaller than the cabinet, they established a core committee: Naidoo and the ministers of finance (to ensure fiscal control), state expenditure (to redirect government spending to RDP priorities), public administration (to refocus the civil service), public works (for job creation) and provincial and local government (for implementation).
Next came interdepartmental task forces — committees drawing people from each relevant department to “avoid duplication and to help efficiency and productivity”. These are operating now in three sectors: rural, urban and human resources development.
He has had to create the RDP Fund — the R2,5-billion allocation intended for specific infrastructural projects.
The RDP standing committee in parliament is another bit of the structure. “We want parliament to become a primary focus in driving the RDP. We need to introduce a performance monitoring and assessment plan, so that when a budget is presented in parliament, we want there to be an RDP report alongside it. This will give the budget its political content and focus the minds of parliament on the goals we have set out, helping them to ask why we have or haven’t achieved them.”
And each province had to set up an RDP commission to drive the process through its structures. In the seven ANC-controlled provinces, it is in the premiers’ offices; in the other two, it is located in the finance departments, both of which are in ANC hands.
The next step is outside government: working to set up structures of co-operation with the non- governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in development. “The government on its own cannot deliver on the RDP … the government leads, but it cannot deliver on its own. So we have to develop a partnership with society around delivery, and one of the most important sectors that has delivered in the past and has a crucial role is the NGOs.
“But the issue we have raised is that, like for government, it is not business as usual. One of the main reasons we have NGOs is because the government in the past failed to deliver. This is not a situation we want to perpetuate, so we are asking NGOs to discuss within themselves how they define their role.
“There needs to be proper co-ordination between ourselves and the NGO sector within an agreed framework around goals we share and want to develop. NGOs have to ask what we ourselves have to ask in government: what value do we add to the process? That is a critical qustion no one can get away from, whether a cabinet minster, a civil servant or an NGO.
“I don’t want a gatekeeping role. I don’t have the desire or the time to play that role, but there has to be some co-ordination and we are asking NGOs to create this mechanism.”
Naidoo will be presenting these ideas at a summit of NGOs this weekend. One idea he is toying with is empowering communities rather than NGOs, and allowing them to choose which NGOs they want to work with, rather than the other way around.
“So you can see that a lot of the work we have done is to put in place the government’s capacity to deliver. The second task is to leverage state resources into the programme.
“We don’t want to up the Budget. We don’t want to increase state expenditure in such a way that it leads to inflation and undermines fiscal discipline. Fiscal discipline is not an Internal Monetary Fund or World Bank term. It is fundamental to achieving the RDP on a sustainable basis.”
This has two elements. The first is to redirect current spending in government departments in line with RDP priorities. The second is ensuring that the ongoing running costs for a project are available from that department. “Unlike some of the NGO experience, where you build a school and then there’s no money to run it, there has to be a reorganisation within the education department to ensure it is allocating the funds for operating costs.”
Naidoo is determined to put in place proper performance monitoring. “We do not want to build toilets in the veld … We are trying to introduce into government what we call an institutional or information management system, a number of high-level performance indicators by which government is judged, not just by parliament but also by the public outside.”
Each project will have a “business plan: I am determined that, on urban projects in particular, there should be a formal contract between all the community organisations, local government, the NGOs and ourselves setting out what the aim of the programme is and the role of each of us.”
He has avoided civil service resistance, he says, by making it a part of the process to consult and involve senior civil servants. “I think that’s been a tremendous success. There has been rigorous debate with some civil servants and they are learning that they don’t have to accept everything I say. I know we don’t have all the answers. But now there is loyalty.
“Everyone has taken the RDP on board … every speech from every party mentions the RDP, everyone is involved: other parties, civil servants, premiers, even the military… It’s become a national drive.”
He hopes the structures he sets in place will fall away over time. “The RDP fund is a temporary mechanism. The ideal situation is where the whole Budget is based on the RDP, and we are giving ourselves five years to do it. At the end of that period — earlier if we can — the Budget should be based on RDP priorities and then there is no need for the fund.” Presumably, Naidoo and his department will then be redundant.
Like Yiddish.
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