Steuart Wright
Public servants queue to place their bags on the conveyor-belt metal detector at Umtata’s Botha Sigcau government building. They wait patiently for the bags to emerge, unfazed by the fact there are no security personnel to check them anyway.
It is part of the ritual of coming to work — in a building where nobody has much to do and the hardest task is the struggle to stay awake.
In the faulty lift, which stops at every floor, I remind myself why I am here: to see how Umtata’s bureaucrats spend their time after announcements by the Eastern Cape Government that a “post-by-post analysis” of its bloated 150 000-strong civil service found it should be reduced by a mere 7 000 jobs.
The first door I poke my head around reveals five women up to their wrists in oily Kentucky Fried Chicken. Three of them are guffawing at their empty desks, while two stare out of the ninth-floor window.
These are health department clerks unashamedly taking an “extended lunch”, which administrative officer Lolita Hokwana explains will probably last the rest of the day. She removes a drumstick from her lips, waves the bone at me and laughs: “Tomorrow morning we will start (work again).”
“We do filing,” she says, “leave gratuities, deceased and retired, study leave and capturing files for the new government. But most of the time we spend looking for lost files …”
I do some more snooping and find about one in three bureaucrats at least looking officious. Countless peer blankly through the windows and even more read
Public Works clerk SC Jonas is one of these, and he frankly admits he is taking a break. “We give ourselves a chance to rest when there are signs of fatigue, because every day we are busy,” he says.
On the seventh floor, I strike it lucky. A transport department worker in a brown suit and sleeveless V-neck jersey nods his greying head sleepily over a thick open file on his desk. He is dozily woken as the squeaking hinges on his door alert him to my presence.
Unoiled hinges appear to be the warning device of at least two other bureaucrats I rudely waken.
Local Government and Housing registry clerk Temba is one of them. “I am just waiting to go home after a day’s work,” he says candidly, with more than 40 minutes to home time.
He too sketches a picture of chaos, where he spends most of his day trying to locate lost files.
Temba says: “If I can be honest to myself and you, there are times you find people sleeping, or just standing along the windows or maybe having a chat in the corridor.”
I walk down the stairs, seeing the funny side of Provincial Director General Thozamile Botha’s attitude that the government is a major job provider in the Eastern Cape which, mindful of high unemployment, would like to keep it that way — even if it means employing people to listen for squeaking hinges. — Ecna