Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
There is no prize for recognising that our civil service is overstaffed, underskilled and unfocused. The government, at any rate, would not reward you for the insight.
The challenge we face is how to reform, even rebuild, the civil service into something that can both deliver quality services and become a serious agent of policy.
It seems the government may not have to look beyond its own ranks and recent experience for a number of good ideas on how to do this. Here, the pre-eminent example is provided by the taxman, the South African Revenue Service (SARS).
As the Mail & Guardian’s Monitor section recorded last week (“Transforming the taxman”, September 3 to 9), radical changes in working practices at the SARS over the past three years have yielded remarkable results. In the last available tax year the SARS collected R4,6-billion (6%) more in personal and individual taxes than targeted; it increased revenues from value- added tax despite a fall in consumer spending; the number of people registered as taxpayers rose by more than 12%; and the number of tax defaulters, whose returns were outstanding, dropped by nearly 9%.
If you’re as backward as I am about filling in your tax return, you may regard this as no good thing. But as an exercise in turning around a moribund former state department, it has been an extraordinary achievement.
The SARS management decided on a few priority objectives and set ambitious but realisable targets in them. Staff salaries were brought into line with those in the private sector – which made recruiting or keeping quality staff easier. Workplace technology and environment were upgraded.
Performance became the key criterion in promotions, not qualifications or length of service. The SARS flattened out its structure: more than 50 seniority and salary levels were reduced to 10. And staff were put on a performance incentive scheme which enabled them to earn a bonus of up to half a year’s salary.
The process of transformation at SARS is ongoing. And one of the more important areas of continuing change is the incentive scheme. Until recently, the scheme rewarded all employees, irrespective of an individual’s contribution to improved performance. New systems should enable the SARS to monitor the performance of an individual or unit more accurately and to set bonuses accordingly.
Much of this change – notably the improvement in pay – has been possible only because the SARS was released from the ranks of the civil service. In 1997 it became a semi-autonomous government agency.
But a number of the changes brought in at the SARS would have been possible even within the stultified ranks of the civil service. And this has, I gather, not been lost on some of the more innovative individuals who remain in the civil service.
Bulelani Ngcuka, South Africa’s prosecutor- in-chief, has started setting priorities and ambitious but realisable targets for prosecutors. Incentive bonus schemes are being developed. And word is that the Department of Justice is looking at internal restructuring. With Kader Asmal now at education, it would not be surprising to hear of similar innovations there.
When it comes to measuring performance, the SARS is, of course, quite fortunate. You can easily measure the SARS’s “product” and any improvement in the output of it. The product is taxes; taxes are money; and money comes in figures.
But how does one accurately measure improved output or performance in health and education? I suppose the number of patients treated, operations performed or matrics passed are measures. But these indices will be of little use where there is a suspicion that they have perhaps been massaged by dispensing aspirins for broken legs or by altering the distribution of matric passes on a bell curve.
There is another relevant difference between the SARS and many of the departments remaining in the civil service. The SARS is an “earning” arm of government. It brings in to the government tens of billions of rands of taxpayers’ money each year. But the other departments – particularly the big ones like education and health – are “spenders”. And measuring how well or effectively a department is spending is a less clear judgment than tallying up an inflow of money. Pressures will grow, however, for us to move in the direction of that kind of performance monitoring, whatever its imprecisions.
The challenge to restructure the civil service falls not just on the government and its senior managers. It will also fall to the trade unions. The public service bargaining council is currently the unwieldy instrument through which the government and unions negotiate annual pay increases for civil servants on a national scale. Unions will need to respond creatively to proposals to turn this council from an unwieldy national instrument into a more flexible body or bodies responsive to the different needs of various parts of the civil service and different regions of the country.
The government may – who knows? – even be bold and push the agency status granted to the SARS as the solution to the problems of all or most departments in the civil service. This is the approach taken by, for example, Australia. There, many former government departments have been freed from central control to adopt whatever employment arrangements meet their particular needs.
Doing the same in South Africa might require quite a bit of political courage. Put another way, it would require what Professor Fanie Cloete of Stellenbosch University calls “a clear national vision for South Africa”.
Head of the university’s School of Public Management and Planning, Cloete is organiser of an international conference, dealing with precisely these issues, which begins in the Winelands next week. The question is: how do we South Africans develop the capacity for good governance?
Cloete looks to the countries of east Asia for his answers – countries which, notwithstanding the emerging markets crisis of the past two years, are in the midst of a renaissance. Key determinants of their success have been, he says, “an agreed national vision … attainable action plans in strategic policy sectors … committed, honest political and administrative leadership … the best use of people, money, supplies and information … effective operational management … a work ethic… and a growing economy”.