Marion Edmunds
THE Minister of Public Service, Zola Skweyiya, acknowledged this week he was in trouble. At a meeting held behind closed doors in Parliament, he bluntly sketched the serious problems undermining transformation in the public service and appealed to parliamentarians, officials and international development experts for help.
It is expected that the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee will, as a result of the meeting, start to play a more active role in monitoring the public service, and putting pressure on wayward departments to tighten their belts.
According to a range of sources, Skweyiya admitted that the rationalisation of government departments had been too slow at best, and non-existent at worst. He reportedly said provincial departments had not rationalised at all, despite frequent promises to do so. He singled out the departments of Health, Education, Labour and Home Affairs as those which had been making an effort to cut down on costs and numbers.
He reportedly also told the group that the government’s right-sizing programme – which aimed to cut down the number of unnecessary posts in the public service – was severely undermining expertise in the public service, and resulting in a haemorrhaging of essential skills. These skills were necessary to get the troubled administrations of provinces back on their feet.
He also spoke of the waste of money through the payment of “ghost” workers, which he said was a larger problem than acknowledged by authorities. He said that more than a billion rand was being spent on ghosts’ salaries.
Skweyiya’s difficulties will be further compounded by negotiations in the Public Service Bargaining Chamber which start in Cape Town on Monday. It has been rumoured that an agreement signed between the unions and the government this year – in which unions secured higher wages for their members in coming years following the abolition of government posts – may have to be revisited because of a failure to abolish enough posts in time. It is said that only 15 000 of the intended 40 000 have been abolished.
This was sharply denied yesterday by Skweyiya’s representative, Thandeke Gqubule, who said the government was committed to paying public servants’ salary increases and there was no link between the success of the voluntary retrenchment programme and the payment of salaries.
Should this be the case, it is expected that tensions between Skweyiya and Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel will rise in Cabinet as the public service fails to make the personnel cuts necessary to make the savings on the wage-bill demanded by the macro- economic plan.
This week a report on administrative problems in the Eastern Cape was tabled in Cabinet, with recommendations on how to solve some problems.
Skweyiya and the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee chairman, Salie Manie, say they will hold a media conference on Tuesday to announce a plan of remedial action to fix the Public Service’s problems. They will also announce their intention to stage a major conference early next year to discuss the problems inhibiting the delivery of government services.