Marion Edmunds and Stuart Hess
THE government is going to battle to reduce the public service to meet its stated targets over the next three years, and to cut the enormous wage bill generated by its many employees.
Senior sources in the Finance Department say it is accepted that targets are over-ambitious, and that the reduction of the public service will be at a much slower rate than projected to the public.
The Public Service Ministry announced earlier that it would reduce its personnel by 100 000 each year for the next three years, in a bid to cut the state’s more than R55-billion wage bill in accordance with the goals of the macro-economic plan. While there is a 7% attrition rate eating away at the numbers, the ministry is hoping severance packages will coax hundreds of thousands of civil servants out of its employ.
However, concerns are mounting outside and inside the government that targets will not be met. This is despite 60 000 funded posts in the service already earmarked for scrapping.
A spot check by the Mail & Guardian on a number of departments indicate the response by civil servants to the invitation of severance packages to be slow.
l The Constitutional Development Department, for example, has only approved eight packages so far, with 42 applications on the director general’s desk for consideration.
l Foreign Affairs has approved 13 severance packages, with 50 applications under consideration.
l The Health Ministry said no final decision had yet been made about rightsizing, but that 70 applications were being considered.
l The Mineral and Energy Department said it had increased its staff by 5% at the start of the year and it could not cut back at all.
l The Justice Department is considering 596 applications for severance packages, but has not granted any yet.
l The Labour Department is considering 275 applications.
l The Department of Land Affairs has approved 40 packages.
A number of departments refused to give figures, saying they report monthly on the rightsizing programme to the Public Service Ministry which has all the data. A number are still deciding whether they can make cuts.
The deputy director general of the public service, Fanie Visser, said he was not in a position to judge how successful the rightsizing programme was at this stage because data was still being collected and information was “contradictory”.
Visser was grilled on the success of the slimming programme by Parliament’s Finance Committee this week. The committee demanded regular reports on the rightsizing plans, with members expressing concern that the public service administration could not meet its targets.
The acting finance director general, Maria Ramos, said this week it was too early to comment on the process or the impact it may have on the macro- economic plan.
” At the moment, there is no cause for concern … The strategy takes into account that there will be an increase in the wage bill in the first few years, before the savings start kicking in,” she said.
A source in the Finance Department said it was accepted that there ought not be too many cuts in the personnel in essential services — the police force, health workers and teachers — which make up 70% of the public service. This leaves only 30% of the service from which to draw the 300 000 reductions in the next three years.
The source said there were pockets in the former TBVC and homeland administrations where reductions could be made — for example, in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province administrations.
The source indicated that government employment could, in fact, rise in some areas, through job- creation programmes and through the establishment of local government administrations. These increases, he said, had been factored into the macro-economic plan.
Professor Serfaas van der Berg of the University of Stellenbosch’s Public Management School raised doubts this week about the public-service targets. He is also worried the government has not come to grips with the implications of the rightsizing project.
“I am not sure whether the government is fully aware of the implications of the rightsizing project. There are pockets of information about, but the information does not seem to be shared.
“There is also a lack of coherence in policy between the macro-economic policy, the policy underpinning public service transformation and the central policy of the government, the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which is about delivery. There is little evaluation about how well we are performing, and part of the problem is that we need many of the people in the public service to provide government services,” he said.