South Africa must do much more to train and create a public service that meets the highest professional standards and ”that is proud of the fact that it exists to serve the people”, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.
He made the statement in his weekly internet column, ANC Today.
While he does not refer to the upcoming national strike by public servants — which looks set to include the health, education and policing sectors — he clearly has this in mind when he refers to the need for public servants to be ”patriotic and selfless”.
Mbeki dismissed the argument that the ordering of human affairs needed to be left largely in the hands of ”the individual” and ”the market”.
The reality was, instead, that the overwhelming majority of South Africans expected that the new, democratic state would come to their aid ”particularly to help extricate the millions of poor people in our country from poverty”.
He summarises a lengthy argument by saying that South Africa needed ”a strong and accountable democratic state” to achieve the noble goals prescribed by the Constitution of the country.
Mbeki noted that a recent Public Service Commission (PSC) report indicated that the public service needed to do more to improve the scope and quality of participation by citizens in its work.
”Based on the information obtained from a selection of 12 provincial and two national departments from the Public Service Monitoring and Evaluation System for the 2005/6 cycle, the PSC found that only 21% of the departments evaluated have policy and guidelines to deal with public participation.”
Only just over a quarter — 29% — of these departments had systems to solicit public participation in the policy development process, he said.
Mbeki said that the report showed that South Africa still had a ”lot of work to do” to build ”the stable and highly motivated public service we need to achieve”. — I-Net Bridge