consultants
DESPITE employing 125 000 public servants, the Northern Province wants to set aside R790-million this year to pay for consultants and “special services”.
The province’s Premier, Ngoaka Ramathlodi, said this week that its army of public officials had been “mostly trained to clerical level” and that the consultants were vital to ensure its administration works.
The province is burdened with public servants inherited from the former homeland administrations in Lebowa, Gazankulu and Venda and the old Transvaal Provincial Administration, and new, inexperienced officials.
The total salary bill budgeted for 1997/98 is more than R6-billion. The Northern Province legislature still has to debate it.
Many of the officials have been housed in Pietersburg hotels and government flats for the past three years – at the taxpayers’ expense.
The Northern Province has a population of five million, 90% of whom live in abject poverty. A public service job is highly prized.
Provisions in the interim Constitution, which still stand, make it impossible for the government to dismiss those they do not need.
“The first job you have to do is get your administration going because that is how you create yourself and for us, this act of creation is far more difficult and complex than in any of the other provinces,” says Ramathlodi.
“We are starting at the back of the queue and we are going to have to work doubly hard just to make up the difference between ourselves and other provinces.”
There has been growing concern about the national government’s use of consultants: the fears were underlined by Auditor General Henri Kluever in his annual report on government finances released in March.
Northern Province plans suggest Kluever may have merely scratched the surface. Kluever said this week he knew nothing about the province’s consultancy budget. The province’s own auditor refused to comment.
The consultancy budget includes R15-million for Ramathlodi’s office, while the provincial Health Department has been allocated R328-million to spend on external advisers and special services. The Education Department has been assigned R246,8-million, the Welfare Department R90,7-million and the Agriculture Department R12,8-million.
Finance MEC Edgar Mushwana says the departments do not necessarily spend every cent on consultants. “Education, I know, spends some of that money on books,” he adds.
The consultants are needed, he says, because the public service is not up to the job. His own department has only just reconciled the accounts of the previous homelands’ administrations – three years after officials began pawing through the books. External consultants had to be hired to complete the job.
Instead, the public service’s main achievements appear to have been to over- run Pietersburg and push up property prices.
Mushwana divides the 125 000 public servants into four groups: the old guard, who complain about the government not sticking to its own rules; former homeland public servants, who are unproductive; malcontents, who want to pull everybody down with them; and “comrades”, who are inexperienced but who want to get things done.
‘We have no shortage of people who are prepared to work late hours and through the weekend without demanding overtime pay,” he says.
Ramathlodi says the province also has to manage ethnic differences between Pedis, Tshongas, Vendas and Afrikaners within the service.
The province is unable to quantify the expense of housing its officials. But a double room at Pietersburg’s Holiday Inn Garden Court – a favoured public servant’s residence – costs anything from R240 a day.
Mushwana says most of the seconded public servants have now been appointed permanently, and the government is obliged to house them for only another six months.
However, soaring property prices – the result of the migration – are making it difficult for public servants to buy or rent accommodation. Rent for a two-bedroom flat can be R1 700 a month, while a three- bedroom house is selling for R300 000. In the officials’ home towns, meanwhile, their exodus has seen prices plummet, leaving them unable to sell.