Drastic changes could shake South Africa’s public service if proposed plans are implemented
Howard Barrell and Glenda Daniels
South Africa’s 1,1-million civil servants face a revolution in their working conditions if the government has the political will to get its plans past suspicious public service trade unions.
The government is due to unveil new pay and retrenchments packages for civil servants next month – the first of several elements in the overhaul of the public service.
The new public service set-up envisaged by the government includes targeted recruitment of the brightest and the best in universities and technikons for management positions. There will be mapped-out career paths for high-flyers under a new, more transparent system of promotions.
Individual civil servants will be rewarded under pay incentive schemes for hard work and for increases in their competencies or responsibilities.
Benefits – such as medical aid, housing and car allowances – will be radically redesigned. And, as employers, the government and the nine provinces will have much more flexibility in retiring or firing civil servants.
The new regime will mean an end to the old system of automatic, so-called “rank- and-leg” promotions that civil servants have enjoyed until now, which has entailed an inexorable rise in the government’s personnel costs, with little or no increase in productivity.
The government will not be entering into a new national framework agreement with trade unions to govern public service conditions of employment. Instead, it wants a series of more pliant and narrower agreements.
The changes will also put in place a flexible framework for the central government and provinces to farm out various functions and services to private companies, co-operatives established by civil servants, and to semi-autonomous agencies run by civil servants on commercial principles. There will be a similar model for service-sharing arrangements, under which several public bodies might co-operate to rationalise the costs to themselves of performing a particular function.
Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi told the Mail & Guardian she hoped to change the culture of the public service in the process.
Fraser-Moleketi told the M&G that the changes would entail job losses in the public service, but she declined to name a figure.
Last week she briefed the Cabinet on the results of audits of the personnel requirements of central government and the provinces. The government was busy analysing them – a process it hoped to complete by June.
Fikile Majola, general secretary of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union, the biggest of the public service unions, told the M&G, however: “There will be no retrenchments in the public service. We have been in no discussion with the government about this issue.”
He added: “We will be going into a meeting with the government on May 15, but this is to discuss renumeration policy and the personnel expenditure review.”
The government’s position on the new pay and retrenchment packages, however, is understood to be that they are not negotiable.
Majola said he had seen a government proposal that certain services be outsourced, but no detail had been tabled “on what needs to be outsourced”.
Majola added: “We have not even jointly decided to outsource, let alone agreed on retrenching – which is premature at this stage. Of course, if the government proposes retrenchments, we will oppose it.
“What they can’t do is just implement,” Majola added.
Fraser-Moleketi said that the government would try to ensure that public servants who lost their jobs were offered retraining, and she hoped that a number would find jobs in the new entities being set up under outsourcing arrangements.
She said the government, too, was keen to avoid the situation that occurred last year when, after pay negotiations broke down between the government and the unions, the government unilaterally implemented its pay proposals.
“We want agreement with the unions on the new plans for the public service,” Fraser-Moleketi said.
“We must move to a settlement this year. We believe we can do it. We are at a very difficult point. But the reality of transforming the public service is that it is about courage and an understanding of the problem – on our side and also on the unions’ side.”
Four years ago the government estimated there were 54E000 supernumeraries – people drawing salaries in the public service who had no designated job to do – most of whom used to work for the former homeland administrations.
The best indications are that the number of public service job losses will be slightly down on that figure in the short to medium term.
In response to a recent parliamentary question, Fraser-Moleketi disclosed that the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture alone had 4E015 supernumeraries, who were employed to do nothing, at a cost of R152-million a year, or R12,7-million a month, to the taxpayer.
Comparative figures show that the South African public service is not overstaffed – even though its use of personpower may be ineffective. South Africa has about 20 civil servants per 1E000 people. Other African countries average out at about 25 per 1E000, while European countries range from 19 to 23 per 1E000 people.
Along with the Public Finance Management Act, gradual implementation of which began this month, the changes to the public service are intended not merely to decrease the huge slice of government spending currently taken up by civil servants’ salaries, but also to ensure much more effective spending of each tax rand. The Act sets up clearer lines of accountability and rules on how government monies are spent.
If greater efficiencies result, this will ensure that there is no fall-off in the availability and quality of services, particularly to poorer communities, when financing or job cutbacks occur in the public service.
If those efficiencies are not achieved, however, the quality of services will suffer.
That has been the outcome of cutbacks
over the past six years in some of the poorer provinces, such as the Eastern Cape and Northern Province.
Currently, for each rand someone pays in tax, 39c goes towards paying a civil servant. The government hopes to bring this down to 37c in 2002/2003.