MEDIA BRIEFING BY THE MINISTER OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION, GERALDINE FASER-MOLEKETI, 12 February 2001

"EFFECTIVE AND INTEGRATED GOVERNMENT AT WORK"

The President's State of the Nation address on Friday sets great store at "Action", action for change, action for development, action for the consolidation of a non-racial, non-sexist democratic society - in Africa. The public service could play a significant role in this activist culture. However, many of the difficulties that society as a whole is experiencing with different aspects of transformation is also hampering the public service in making rapid progress in this regard.

We would like to continue on the lines of call to action this morning. We would like to mention some elements of progresses made during last year in the collective work of the Governance and Administration Cluster and share with you the broad outlines of the Cluster's action plan for 2001. By setting this out publicly, the media and us can jointly play a constructive role in monitoring progress, keeping the machinery of government on track for the ideals towards which we are working and encourage the public service to continue to play its role and improve on its efforts. We believe the public service can simultaneously play a profound and leading role in transforming our society, as well as serve as a learning laboratory for the nation on very difficult issues that need to be addressed.

The theme, which we are choosing for our work in the Governance and Administration Cluster this year, is "Effective and Integrated Government at Work". The action theme of the President is clearly picked up by this cluster with the emphasis on "at work". The requirement for every public servant in a department in this cluster will be to work hard and work smart. The requirement will further be to work in line and in support of government's political programme of institutionalising the ideal of a non-racist, non-sexist developmentally oriented democracy. We will only achieve effectiveness if the products of our work are completely in line with these goals for our society. "Integrated work" is the approach we believe that will take us quickest and best, with the least wastage happening, to our ideal.

The panel of Ministers present here represents the most cross-cutting cluster of the six government clusters. What we do in this cluster affects the ability of the entire government to actually rise to the occasion and deliver against the policy programme of government. I will speak about the general and integrative issues pertaining to the Governance and Administration Cluster while my colleagues will focus briefly on more specific areas

Effective and efficient structures and systems of government

The structures and operations of government are highly complex, comprising a large number of interconnected policy-making, regulatory and service delivery webs, many of which needs to function quite independently. However, in all of this activity there is a need for a co-ordinating and integrating force - the centre of government. Substantial effort in the past year has gone to this effect, and some of the fruits of our labour are starting to show.

Significant progress has been made with preparing an integrated planning framework for government. This framework will in future assist so that budgetary allocations are made in support of policy priorities, rather than budgets driving government activity. The integrated planning framework will allow us to put budgeting on a more programmatic footing, which cuts across the working of line departments. In this way we can assure that it is the interest of the bigger whole that constitutes government that triumphs, rather than more individualistically motivated agendas.

Initial steps have been taken in 2000 to constitute multi-departmental sectoral reviews for the mid-year budgetary MTEC processes and these efforts will be strengthened this year. By 2002/03 we want to ensure integrated programme budgeting. We are starting to see this way of work coming through very strongly. See for example the announcements regarding the Urban Renewal Strategy, the Integrated and Sustainable Rural Development Strategy, the integrated crime prevention strategy and others. And this is not only a phenomenon at the National level. The efforts of the provincial governments, as well as those of the local authorities will come in line under these strategies. Gauteng Province will for example shortly unveil its own massive programmes for Urban Development.

Part of the input to the MTEC process will be peer review of the operations of different departments. The first pilots of such a review process will start in this year.

To support such planning and decision-making attention has been given in the last year to developing an integrated monitoring and evaluation system for tracking service delivery outputs and governments' impact on society. Initial background studies have been completed on the requirements for an integrated system that can provide the necessary evidence to base important service delivery and resource allocation related decisions on. By year-end the plans for such a system should be finalised and some piloting of the system completed.

During 2000 we have identified weak management capacity as a focus area for our attention. Accordingly we have developed the Senior Management Service system. The roll out of this system, in particular aspects that will deal with strengthened systems of recruitment and performance management and management development will receive more attention in 2001. Aspects of the work that the Public Service Commission have been undertaking supports the development of a stronger management cadre which we believe is key to achieving greater effectiveness in government. These include efforts to verify the qualifications of all currently employed senior managers - a task that will be completed during the first half of 2001 - as well as the evaluation of Heads of Departments.

A key priority which commenced in June 1999 to improve the overall quality of the information stored in the current salary payment system - PERSAL - is achieving groundswell successes across government departments and the provinces. Minimum information requirements for each department have been set and validations for captured information were introduced.

On the basis of improved information in the PERSAL system we are generating regularly human resource management reports - the Vulindlela quarterly reports - for all executing authorities and their administrative heads on a quarterly basis. For the first time ever the leadership can see, at a glance what the gender, race, disability and age profile of their staff is, what the leave patterns are, what the skills profile look like, and what is being achieved in terms of human resource development. The information is made even more useful by tracking trends and providing comparisons - within other departments in the same sector, within a given province and against the national profile. This initiative will be extended to also cover districts and service delivery institutions in the term to come.

In line with the President's commitment to ensure competitiveness through innovation we have decided on establishing a Centre for Public Service Innovation. The Centre will be established by July 2001. The creation of the Centre is aimed at mainstreaming innovation and to ensure the better utilisation of the creative energies of public servants, private sector, community organisations and other local and international role-players in promoting innovation in the delivery of SA government's objectives

The direct and indirect benefits of the Centre include:
* improving the efficiency/ effectiveness of government service delivery;
* improving the image of Government internally, regionally and internationally;
* encouraging and ensuring better/ closer relationship between government and other sectors; and
* creating opportunities for the private sector, community organisations and individual public servants to showcase their talents as well as finding synergy and stimulus to spawn creativity.

Strengthening local government
This year the G&A cluster will also prioritise the strengthening of local government which is seen as the feet and legs of government in the service delivery chain. The Integrated and Sustainable Rural Development Strategy as well as the Urban Renewal Strategy will be given significant impetus through these endeavours. My colleague Minister Mufamadi will deal with these initiatives more in-depth on Thursday, during a briefing specifically on these programmes.

E-government
The President clearly indicated that the information and technology ability of our country is a key resource in our effort to remain a relevant player in the global setting. To this effect he has appointed an International Task Force, including such eminent public management/socio-development commentators as Prof. Manuel Castell.

The appropriate acquisition, deployment and operation of information technology carries with it the potential to lower public administration cost, improve productivity in the public service and making interfacing with government more convenient to the general population. A direct relation therefore exists between e-government and our attempts at greater efficiency and effectiveness, and improved service delivery. One of the flagship projects in this regard will be the G2G web based portal, specifically designed to facilitate information exchange between various government departments.

Many and varied initiatives in this field started to be implemented last year. In the rural areas better integration of government systems by using information technology is already yielding positive results. The seven Multi-purpose Community Centres (MPCCs) rolled out last year are receiving good feedback in terms of customer satisfaction with the implementation of their One-stop Service Delivery approach - an approach piloted in the Northern Cape. Typically these Centres integrate services rendered by Department of Home Affairs, Welfare, Labour, Agriculture, Government Communication and Information, Public Works and Communication.

Human Resource Development
The people in government remain our biggest asset in our efforts to transform South African society. Therefore human resource development remains a crucial area of our work. We need to focus on appropriate skills development, deployment and integrated HR planning. We are encouraged with the outcomes of the Public Service Job Summit held late last month an agreement has been reached on a need to protect and create quality employment. 'Skilling-up' and 're-skilling' will form an essential part of the HRD strategy.

The PSETA has been established in 2000 and operations from this quarter will be stepped up in 2001. Its work is cut out for it in this year. PSETA will focus on the identification of scarce skills that have been identified during last year. Programme development will be accelerated for these scarce skill areas. The skills gaps that are most pronounced in the public service are Information Technology, Project and Financial Management Skills.

SAMDI has also identified key leverage areas that will respond to the intention of the Framework Agreement of the Public Service Job Summit. One of the key priorities is to ensure the development of Human Resource practitioners that are comfortable with the demands of the 21st century public service organisation. In the period 2001 - 2002 SAMDI will develop and register a standardised, uniform outcomes-based Human Resource certificate, aligned to SAQA specification that are appropriate to all public service units.

SAMDI will also give special attention to equipping managers with the necessary tools and techniques that will allow them to progress with the realisation of Batho Pele principles in practice.

The G&A cluster will focus some of its effort on the development of functional literacy and the improvement of basic administrative capacity of public servants.

Improving service delivery and renewing commitments to Batho Pele

The final judges of whether government was successful in transforming the public service are our people. If they are satisfied with the services they receive and the generally improved conditions of daily living we have succeeded.

One of our aims is to achieve integrated and seamless delivery of key services. The approach is to be guided by key life events, such as birth, starting work, marriage and death, to name but a view. Such life events mark the interaction between members of the public and the state. The ideal is that the population should only provide the same set of information once to government, and that this automatically gets shared throughout the system. Any changes get updated once. The state can use such information to undertake planning, scheduling and forecasting for a wide range of services, e.g. education provision, housing and township development, job creation, etc. This cluster will focus on how to provide infrastructure that will support such seamless interaction across traditionally separated processes. The Department of Home Affairs completed a study during last year on how to combine a future ID documentation system with that of multi-purpose "smart cards". One of the far-reaching decisions that will be made by Cabinet in this year is the how to proceed with the issue of "smart cards" as a potential tool in seamless service delivery.

In terms of our service delivery innovation frameworks we are looking at doing things differently. Under the aegis of the IPSP in the Northern Province we have embarked on some pilot projects. Improvements are already starting to become noticeable after service standards (both transversal and domain specific) have been formulated, the adherence to which are monitored by peer review teams, who pay surprise visits to clinics, hospitals, schools, etc. Weak service provision is followed up through support and further surprise visits happen. Visible improvements have become noticeable in terms of the times that service delivery institutions are actually open and functioning, when staff is on duty and that children are actually more in the classrooms when they are supposed to be - to mention but a few examples.

Corruption
This year will see major progress with anti-corruption work in the country as a whole and in the Public Service specifically. The National Anti-corruption Forum, which establishes a structured partnership between government, Business and Civil society, in order to create a national consensus on the fight against corruption will be launched in March 2001. The footwork for this initiative has been completed.

An investigation is on the cards into, where necessary, rationalising the country's anti-corruption capability and creating specific capabilities if we must.

Government will also participate in the United Nation's Global Programme against Corruption. This programme will assist in the corruption assessment, developing capacity for the main corruption-busting agencies and tailored programmes for selected departments and provinces.

The above initiatives in no way preclude low key tightening up of our systems where they were in the past open to facilitate corruption. Some of the improvement in systems as alluded to earlier, such as the improvements on the PERSAL system has already overtaken some of the concerns, for example raised in the Auditor-General's recently released report on The Salary Bill of Selected Departments. Checks and balances on the system such as authenticated PERSAL and ID numbers, and the verification of employees by managers on a monthly basis, has been strengthened significantly. As a consequence many of the issues raised in the report, have actually been attended to already.

IN CONCLUSION
The programme outlined by the G&A Cabinet and FOSAD committees is an ambitious one, but one that excites me - and I believe my colleagues - very much. We believe that we are making strong progress in getting an environment in place that are conducive to improved and accelerated service delivery.