Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi corrected the new Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, Buyelwa Patience Sonjica, when she said some targets would be met. Taking the microphone from her, he said: “No, not some targets will be met. All targets will be met.”
They were speaking at a briefing of the Cabinet’s social development cluster in Parliament on Tuesday.
This is the kind of confidence displayed by Minister of Housing Lindiwe Sisulu, who had been given a three-month deadline to deliver a plan on human settlements to Cabinet, but declared that she would do so in two months.
The targets vary: three months for Sisulu to come up with a plan, five years for Sonjica to deliver water to those who currently have no access to it.
Everyone praised President Thabo Mbeki for setting implementation dates, even opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon. In his last term of office Mbeki has showed a boldness not quite displayed before in South Africa. But, while some of the targets may have been suggested to him by the relevant government departments during consultations, it is not known how many were told they must fall in line with the priorities of the African National Congress manifesto and the Cabinet lekgotla.
In Parliament this week Mbeki’s Cabinet promised hundreds of thousands of jobs, the completion of the land restitution programme, a roof over every head, and every house having easy access to electricity and clean water within the next five to eight years. Ideally, the country will be a much better place to live when it hosts the Soccer World Cup.
That’s the legacy Mbeki will want to leave as he begins his last term: that of a hands-on manager who has delivered for poor South Africa and improved their lives in a way no one has before.
Political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi says whether Mbeki acquires that reputation or not depends on whether the tension between political imperatives and administrative goals is managed smoothly.
He said the government has admitted that it still needs to train most civil servants, who will find themselves under pressure to deliver at the same time. “From where the president is sitting, the political imperatives are non-negotiable.”
Certainly, the ability of the departments to deliver might depend on how they plan their strategies. A few already indicate that they will respond by creating new layers of bureaucracy to meet some of their goals.
The Department of Provincial and Local Government will be setting up a team of troubleshooters, who will be sent into municipalities to help them tackle financial problems or lack of human resources.
The troubleshooting team will be replicated from national to provincial level, where individuals highly skilled in finance and accounts will be employed to sort out the mess.
Another new layer created by the government will be community development workers (CDWs). The government says their role will be to remove development deadlocks, ensure the poor have an organised voice, determine the needs of communities and communicate these to the relevant government structures, and basically monitor government delivery. By the end of this month about 800 CDWs will have been trained. A government brochure says the philosophy of CDWs is “to strengthen democratic social contract”.
The government is also going to form an integrated unit made up of the Scorpions, police and intelligence to embark on a mission to arrest the country’s top 200 wanted criminals. Another layer, to police the railways, is being considered. Four hundred additional personnel have been recruited for a pilot project in Cape Town.
With an increased public service, some of the new structures will be monitored to see whether they improve efficiency or add to the confusion about who should be doing what.
Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi this week said Mbeki’s goals appeared to be set centrally when most of the delivery needs to happen at provincial and local-government level.
“One cannot make commitments from the centre to delivering houses when the matter is handled by provinces. This constant centralising and centralised perspective will remain a major impairment in actual delivery.
“If we are to bridge the gap between policy and implementation, we must recognise that in our system of government and in our reality, implementation and delivery are the responsibility of provincial and local government,” Buthelezi said.
With the ANC controlling all nine provinces and governing in most of the country’s 284 municipalities, the pressure will be on.
Local governments will manage R15-billion of the Expanded Public Works Programme, which will focus on building infrastructure in the municipalities. The programme is a key labour-intensive strategy of the government to alleviate poverty in the next few years. It aims to draw significant numbers of the unemployed into productive employment so that workers can gain skills and increase their capacity to work elsewhere once they leave the programme.
Mbeki has acknowledged that most of the local governments are struggling to survive. Mufamadi will have to monitor carefully the use of the R15-billion and ensure that it is not misappropriated for other purposes by the local governments.
Most provinces are functioning fairly efficiently but some provincial departments have struggled to spend their budgets, resulting in underspending when people are in dire need of delivery.