President Thabo Mbeki may soon have all government information at his fingertips at the push of a button, if a new electronic monitoring system for the president gets the go-ahead.
Such a system to enable the president to monitor progress in implementation of government policy was currently under consideration, confirmed government spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe.
No details would be available until a report on this proposal was released around mid-year.
But this initiative would not necessarily require additional funding for the presidency. As each government department was already monitoring progress, it could all be just a case of setting up an electronic system so that the president could log into the available information.
If approved, ”the president will be able to monitor [implementation] on an ongoing basis”, Netshitenzhe said.
Last year the Cabinet had launched an information management system that has the software capacity for policy monitoring. Known for his partiality to trawling the Internet, Mbeki hinted at such a development during his State of the Nation address on February 14.
”Monitoring capacity at the level of the presidency will have to be strengthened,” he said, as part of the announcements on the establishment of a corps of community development workers to liase between South Africans and government departments and the appointment of project managers, accountable to the executive, to ensure implementation across all spheres of government.
A further hint was contained in the presidency’s budget vote, whose stated policy developments included ”an electronic system for monitoring policies” and ”a secure IT system for distributing Cabinet information”.