Unlike most copyright owners, the M&G thinks imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
We were a bit worried about the potential for brand confusion when the Democratic Alliance ”borrowed” our annual Cabinet report card to score the performance of government ministers, but we are delighted that Jacob Zuma’s new administration has now decided to make a ”simple one page report card” part of the new architecture of accountability within government.
As Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi has said: ”The days to keep dead wood in Cabinet and the public service belong in the past.”
During Thabo Mbeki’s second term we were treated to details on the government’s ”programme of action”, but it became increasingly meaningless as its administrators shied away from allocating individual responsibility.
The virtue of the mechanism proposed by the new monitoring and evaluation czar, Collins Chabane, during his budget vote speech in Parliament this week is that it offers a simple, easily understood measure of performance, which should be harder to fudge.
Although it is not yet clear how ministers’ performances would be measured, Chabane indicated the immediate focus for the Monitoring and Evaluation Department would be in seven areas, which include basic education, health, safety, rural development, housing, job creation strategies and public sector capacity. Addressing the many problems within these areas will be no walk in the park.
For ministers of education, as well as health and human settlements, there are some obvious points of departure: improving academic outcomes, fixing woeful health and education infrastructure and dramatically reducing housing backlogs. The police must improve detection rates, managing crime rather than massaging statistics.
To make any real progress Chabane and his counterpart, Trevor Manuel, will have to take some simple but difficult steps:
- Adopt a genuinely zero-tolerance approach to corruption;
- Ban the holding of private business interests by public servants;
- End the involvement of politicians in the adjudication of tenders;
- Ensure posts in the public service are filled by competent people irrespective of their political affiliation;
- Cut wasteful expenditure; and
- Measure real outcomes, not rands spent and promises made.
The writers of what must now become the most important report card in the country would not do too badly to take these performance markers as starting points.
Chabane and Manuel have said green papers will be released within the next month outlining their plans. That kind of public consultation is welcome and we would like to get in early with a suggestion that clear, widely published measuring tools form part of their approach.
If President Zuma delivers a meaningful assessment system and then acts boldly and consistently on its conclusions, he will not only enhance delivery, but also greatly enhance his own credibility.
Power-sharing isn’t democracy
June 26 marks the 49th anniversary of Madagascar’s independence from France. The Indian Ocean island’s population will ”celebrate” the occasion while under the illegitimate rule of Andry Rajeolina. The former DJ and mayor of Antananarivo claimed power on the back of military support, which ousted the democratically elected president Marc Ravalomanana in March this year.
This week the Southern African Development Community (SADC) dispatched former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano to mediate and find a political solution within 30 days. This, with the African Union’s expulsion of Madagascar after March’s coup, must be commended.
President Jacob Zuma, who holds the rotating SADC presidency, has called for ”inclusive political dialogue where all relevant stakeholders have an opportunity to be part of the solution”. While dialogue, rather than violence, is welcomed, we are increasingly wary of the growing tendency to resolve the clash of democrats and tyrants in Africa by means of power-sharing agreements.
The SADC negotiated a power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe. Despite representing a democratic majority, the MDC is treated as a minority party and is struggling to effect transformation in government and broader society.
Likewise, the National Unity Government brokered by former UN general secretary Kofi Annan in Kenya after President Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity contrived to steal an election Kibaki had lost. Inertia and corruption have characterised the power-sharing government.
Seventy percent of Kenyans who responded to a March opinion poll felt that the unity government had achieved ”nothing” after its first year in office.
Lasting peace needs real democracy.