President Thabo Mbeki has staked his leadership on a Programme of Action — a 53-page scorecard of social pledges to be fulfilled by 2009.
Every two months the presidential policy unit, headed by Joel Netshitenzhe, updates the programme on the government website as a goad for ministers and checklist for the public. But, according to researchers, the exercise is based on questionable statistics, particularly in regard to population growth and exaggerated claims of what policies can achieve.
Rationalising government “may take us at least five years”, Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi told the Mail & Guardian recently.
The executive has steered away from the quantitative outcomes of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). While Netshitenzhe insists the RDP goals are simply repackaged in the Programme of Action, the new targets contain few delivery outputs such as numerical targets for electricity connections or houses. Instead they are cautiously measured in terms of inputs — the greatest public efficiency for the least cost.
Tough numerical goals, particularly in regard to local government delivery backlogs, have either slipped off the agenda or been blurred by indistinct time frames and expanded budget allocations.
Goolam Aboobaker, deputy director general in the Presidency, emphasised that levels of public expenditure were no longer the issue. The debate was now about a skilled and committed civil service that could address underspending in many government departments.
“It’s a huge challenge,” said Fraser-Moleketi. “When people look at government they say we are not functioning as efficiently as we should. But they don’t think why — I don’t think anyone actually realises how complex this is.”
Water
The Programme of Action, updated at end-June, pledges that all households will have access to clean running water by 2009. It says 10-million people currently have a basic water supply. There are 29-million “indigents” who live below the poverty line of about R450 a month and qualify for free basic services, according to Parliament’s local government committee.
David Hemson, research director at the Human Sciences Research Council, says the relatively stagnant proportion of the budget (0,7%) going to water services in the medium term is unlikely to dent the current backlog by 2009, and that 2,1-million households will remain unserviced by that date.
Aboobaker disputes Hemson’s figures, saying they are based on an exaggerated population growth figure (2,25% annually, based on the latest 2001 Statistics South Africa census). “The population growth between 2004 and 2005 was estimated at 0,92% according to Stats SA,” said Aboobaker. “Hemson uses a figure that would exaggerate the estimate of number of households.”
Housing
The Programme of Action focuses on budgetary allocations to cater for housing backlogs — for example R14,2-billion will be spent over the next three years to provide basic shelter. According to Statistics SA, the current housing backlog is about two million. At current subsidy levels the R14,2-billion would result in 550 000 subsidies. On this basis the state would provide an average of 183 000 houses each year for the next three years, well below what is required to address the current backlog, said Hemson.
Aboobaker said Hemson’s figures fail to take into account the private sector, which committed R42-billion for the provision of low-cost housing for “households earning between R1 500 and R7 000 per month”.
The housing department suffers a 30% staff shortage, including vacancies in key areas such as land surveying. Fraser-Moleketi said she was taking measures to address this.
She conceded that the public service shake-out of 2002 had not worked, as it had resulted in a skills exodus. “With the benefit of hindsight, we have realised that in many cases this was not used as a human resources tool. It became a mechanical exercise.”
Indigent policy
A new indigent policy aimed at ensuring that the poorest of the poor have access to a package of basic services by 2012. Among other things, it would end currently overlapping responsibilities of the three tiers of government and ensure more efficient and effective spending. Due to take effect in selected metropolitans and rural nodes by June, it is still on the drawing board.
Fraser-Moleketi said it would be years before the civil service was unified. “Politically there is a buy-in for a more integrated service delivery approach, but at the level of officials there are turf battles,” she said.
From November, Fraser-Moleketi will lead a team to India to begin a recruitment drive of financial and human resources specialists seconded to South African municipalities. “We are looking at foreign skills because we don’t want municipal managers to be more worried about who their mentors are,” she said. “Contractors brought in from the outside on a short-term basis and for skills transfer will understand that it’s not a political appointment.”
Expanded Public Works Programme
The only reference to job creation in the Programme of Action is the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). The goals are modest: the EPWP aims to create a million short-term jobs by 2009, using a R45-billion budget.
While the government website claims the programme is on track, University of Cape Town researcher Anna McCord believes there is “a major disjunction between the EPWP as perceived in the public discourse and its reality … exaggerated claims for what it can achieve are inhibiting debate on alternative larger-scale government responses to unemployment and poverty.”
McCord argues that the EPWP characterises the unemployment problem as transient, pending the rising tide of employment resulting from economic growth. In fact, the unemployment problem is “structural and chronic”.
She believes policy should be orientated to “the creation of demand through the implementation of large scale public sector employment programmes … rather than through labour supply.”
Fully implemented, the EPWP will deliver 200 000 temporary jobs a year, lasting an average of four months — which is estimated at between 2% and 4% of the unemployed working only days per year. To meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving unemployment by 2014, about four million to eight million additional jobs will be required.
Bongani Gxilishe, the deputy director general for the EPWP, said the programme is not supposed to be “a panacea to all problems of unemployment … It’s making a small contribution and is one of the interventions in the second economy.”
Meanwhile, a draft Local Government: Municipal Employees Bill was released in Parliament recently. The draft Bill is part of a suite of new legislation to centralise power at a national level to bring under-performing municipalities into line.
The draft Bill gives the ministers of public service and administration and provincial and local government the power to deploy government employees vertically and horizontally across the three tiers of government.