Government is increasingly turning to business to help kick-start delivery, reports Marion Edmunds
THE high-profile appointment of South African Breweries chief executive, Meyer Kahn, to the police service is just one example of a growing trend in government to rely on private-sector management skills to kick-start delivery.
The departments of justice, welfare, safety and security and correctional services are to be boosted by a five-person team from a private company to help implement strategic anti-crime programmes.
The initiative will cost R502-million, to be funded by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). The private- sector managers will cost the taxpayer about R8-million – 3% of the programme costs – and they will be seconded for two years. Their role will include assisting in setting up programmes to improve law court management, upgrade prisons and to provide skills training for convicted criminals.
At the same time, the managers will be training their civil servant colleagues, and introducing new, efficient working methods to a sluggish public sector.
The Department of Education is to follow suit, hiring private-sector managers to assist in a R160-million programme to establish youth colleges in all nine provinces. The departments of housing, constitutional development and health are hooking into private managers too, with health, for example, having already contracted out the management of the key RDP project, the Primary School Nutrition Feeding scheme, to Ernst & Young at a cost of R7-million last year.
The basis for the introduction of private- sector managers to the heart of the public sector has in part been laid by a small team of people originally seconded from the private sector and parastatals to work in the RDP office. They are called the Programme Management Service, and fell into deputy finance minister Gill Marcus’s lap when the RDP office closed almost a year ago. Their contracts are negotiated annually, and their salaries are paid by the companies from which they are seconded.
Neil Nel, formerly of the Agricultural Research Council, heads the team. “Our job is implementation. We don’t fall under any line function, we can push and shove without worrying about our position. We can cut through red tape and access expertise in the public sector, which is sometimes locked up,” he says.
Nel’s management gurus have been sent to the provinces, education, the anti-crime departments, constitutional development, housing and health. Two have recently been dispatched to the welfare department, where they are to provide much-needed assistance in setting up structures to implement the new child grant scheme, which is not an RDP-funded project.
Dr Johan Olivier, a member of the team working in the education department and on crime-fighting projects, is excited about what he believes to be a revolution in management in the public sector.
“In the past 18 months we have learnt that there is just not adequate management capacity . What we are developing is a systematic approach to assisting departments. One of the key objectives of the RDP was to transform government, and we are using RDP fund money for projects as leverage to assist departments to transform.”
Olivier believes the public service restricts itself through bad practices. Some civil servants actively resist change; some are embroiled in departmental politics; others are hampered by tunnel vision, which prevents them from finding solutions in other departments.
But Neil Coleman of the Congress of South African Trade Unions is alarmed. He says the logic and ethos of business are different to that of the civil service.
“This is a relatively new development and it does raise some worrying questions. South African business management is notoriously inefficient, particularly when it comes to managing human resources . It’s quite strange that all of a sudden, South African business is trumpeted as this panacea for problems in the public sector. If one looks at the international experience, there have been efforts to mechanically transpose business methods into the public sector, often with disastrous consequences,” he said.