The government is checking up on public servants with a series of “mystery customer” visits to test service delivery.
Joining the queues at government departments will be members of the Public Service Commission, while unannounced visits by ministers will test services as they happen — without a prior alert to frontline staff to be on their best behaviour.
These surprise visits, recently approved by the Cabinet, come as the Department of Public Service and Administration is finalising a monitoring and evaluation framework for service delivery across government. The framework, which is due to be completed in 2005, will be used to help identify shortcomings.
The ideal public servant? “Somebody who’s able to push the boundaries, who does not just follow regulations but is innovative,” Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi told the Mail & Guardian during this week’s public service senior management conference in Cape Town. And that creativity does not necessarily have a huge price tag: it may simply mean not taking breaks during ordinary lunch hours, the only time many citizens can take off from their own work.
Fraser-Moleketi expects public servants to put up with some inconvenience in order to deliver better services to South Africans. “Nobody has a gun against the head to join the public service. It’s their choice,” she said.
As the government eyes increasing productivity and service delivery in the civil service, last week’s strike by 800 000 public servants highlighted that, aside from salary grievances, there are concerns about working conditions.
Workers should be seen as assets, not a cost, National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union policy head Thebogo Phadu told the M&G. “How can you deliver if there are not sufficient numbers of people or equipment to meet targets?”
It is now time to invest more in workers, their working environment and equipment. Financial allocations since 2001 are “merely catching up on what was lost” in the tight fiscal years between 1996 and 1999, said Phadu. “You need to create job satisfaction and at the same time workers are encouraged to work better.”
While the public service department has spent much effort on training and empowering senior management, it is now important to get on board more junior public servants to effect change, Fraser-Moleketi said. But senior managers have to lead by example: “Batho Pele is not just a policy on paper. It is a mindset geared towards better service delivery and enhanced development.”
Addressing the conference, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel cautioned against senior civil servants turning into “a self-serving elite” who were only interested in their own bank balances and access to economic opportunities and welfare.
Humility towards the poor was the greatest attribute of a civil servant, Manuel said. “We choose to serve and accept that we will be comfortable or we enter the private sector in pursuit of wealth. We cannot do both.”
The “mystery customer” visits are the latest in a series of initiatives to ensure effective service delivery. These include e-government, policies to ease unnecessary administration and the training of community development workers as a link between communities and government.
An outstanding task is to build a unified civil service across all spheres of government. Local government officials are not part of the 1,1-million civil servants and have their own conditions of service — even though municipalities have been put at the coalface of service delivery: they must provide free basic services, and draft and implement development plans.
But because they are not part of the civil service they cannot be held to account in terms of the Batho Pele policy. And the Treasury repeatedly expressed concern that remuneration of local government staff outstrips their national and provincial counterparts.