A frustrated new minister of water affairs warns his civil servants that he expects attitudes to change, or else reports Paul Stober
THE first clear sign of problems between new cabinet ministers and old-guard civil servants has emerged in a scathing speech by Water Affairs and Forestry Minister Kader Asmal to his department.
The Weekly Mail & Guardian has been given a copy of a speech Asmal made earlier this month to his top officials, sketching the frustrations he was experiencing in injecting new life into the department.
Asmal made it clear he had found his first three months with the department “frustrating” and that officials were not “within miles of grappling with the challenges that lie ahead”.
He said he found it “incredible” that the debate in the department was not over what could be done about the inequity of water supplies, but over “whether such inequity actually exists”.
He accused officials of “tardiness” and “passivity”.
He pointed out that:
* Department officials are out of touch with the needs of communities on the ground. “Twelve to 16 million people without ready access to clean water and 21 million with out hygienic sanitation … seems to be a problem noted in principle, but not dealt with in practice.”
* All new initiatives in the Water Affairs and Forestry Ministry have come from people brought in from outside the department.
* Officials are “passive … and there is a tardiness about supplying information”. But, added Asmal: “I have never felt there is an open hostility.” He quoted an example where it took the department six weeks to tell him it could not find R400 000 to complete the mapping of underground water in kwaZulu/Natal.
* The department is out of touch with the priorities of the new South Africa. “The central focus of the department is people, not planning, resource management or professional excellence — however important they may be,” said Asmal.
* Complaints from the new provinces that the department is not helping them solve their water problems. A letter from the MEC for Environmental Affairs and Tourism in the drought-stricken Northern Transvaal, says: “We have received very little assistance — if any — from the regional management … I do not see us managing to resolve the problem given the pace with which your department is moving.”
Asmal made it clear to the officials that he expects things to change. “There seems to be the mistaken notion that all that is necessary is for the department to adjust to the new minister. This is a grave mistake. Things will never be the same again,” said Asmal.
He made it clear he was prepared to use whatever space he had to implement far-reaching changes in his department. “We are now in an interim phase. All senior management officials are acting in their present posts in an interim capacity. The constitution provides for job security but not retention in a particular job,” he warned.
Asmal outlined his plans to overhaul the department, which includes a complete policy and staffing review, reducing comsumption and increasing capital expenditure. He announced the appointment of a strategic management team, chaired by his adviser, Tony Heard, to oversee the process of change in the department.
This was, he said, because he had concluded that “the process of change in the deparment will not occur simply by evolution”.
Warned Asmal: “My advisers will be accepted by the interim management and will not be considered as intruders in the department. From now on they have full and direct access to every level of the department with my full authority.”
Asmal urged his officials to work with him in bringing change: “We are either going to work together on the platform on which the new government of national unity was elected or, like the proverbial rats on a sinking ship, we shall go down fighting one another … who wants that?”
A WM&G whip-around of different ANC-led government departments revealed different degrees of co-operation between the new ministers and the old staff. In most departments the feeling was that an uneasy truce held because the new ministers had not yet tried to implement any drastic restructuring. “A bit later in the year it may be a completely different story,” said an senior ANC government official.
Other officials described the relationship between the new ministers as “surprisingly good”, saying there was a genuine desire on the part of their departments to deliver the goods.