Marion Edmunds
THE R18-million Presidential Review Commission (PRC) – tasked to investigate the public service – is heading for a crash, and may well be deproclaimed by Cabinet, a year before concluding its business.
Sources say that Public Service Minister Zola Skweyiya has instructed his staff to prepare a Cabinet memorandum suggesting the PRC be closed down.
The commission was proclaimed by President Nelson Mandela in March this year, and was given a year-and-a-half to do an independent study of the public service, and make recommendations for improvement. The commission’s price-tag was R18-million, R14- million of which would come from the British, Canadian and Swedish governments, who have sent experts to participate in the commission, but have not yet put their money on the table. If the commisssion is closed down now the taxpayer could have to provide the millions of rands that have already been spent.
Six months after its inception, the PRC appears to have to run into difficulties. Rumours are rife that at the centre of the storm are differences of opinion between Skweyiya and the chairman of the PRC Professor Bax Nomvete as to how the commission’s teams of experts should be deployed.
Sources say Skweyiya wanted the PRC to throw its weight and expertise behind his own department’s investigations into the country’s nine provincal adminstrations, and that Nomvete refused on the grounds that the PRC was independent of government, concerned with long-term research to get to the root of the public service’s problems.
There is evidence, however, that the PRC’s task teams and Skweyiya’s own departmental investigative teams are beginning to bump into each other in the provincial administrations and, on the surface at least, are doing similar if not competing investigations.
“The PRC task teams have been put on ice, so to speak,” said a source. “During the last week or so we have had increasing problems getting money from the task team to do interviews and investigations and there is a demand that we go through formal procedures and the treasury.”
Skweyiya, Nomvete and Ncholo had not responded to questions at the time of going to press.