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Africa Public Service Day: Public service in a structural and cultural quagmire

21 June 2022 | Story Prof Pearl Sithole | Photo Sonia Small

Opinion article by Prof Pearl Sithole, Vice-Principal: Academic and Research, Qwaqwa Campus, University of the Free State.

Public service is the heart of the strategic and operational compass of any country. Whereas politics is in the space of driving the national vision, socio-economic positioning of a country and consolidating the symbolic essence of a nation; public service is the heartbeat of monitoring strategy against present coalface realities. Political leadership can successfully focus on visioning if its relationship with public administration is healthy. This means there must be professionals who can, on the one hand, advise on strategic scenarios to achieve a political vision, and on the other, fine-tune professionalism for the everyday service experience of the citizen as they tap into government products to assist living and livelihoods. A healthy relationship is one that has sufficient thresholds of expertise, operational agility, ethics and visioning for both political office-bearers and public servants. It is that mutual respect for vision and professional lines that influence each other that makes or breaks the functionality of public administration in any country. It has to be a tango of political and professional strategising that happens best when the country has a fair degree of patriotism amongst its important stakeholders, including business.

Sadly, in recent times there is very little good news regarding the performance of the public service in South Africa. Of course, some within a largely failing system are trying very hard to do their best. Yet public service and public administration in South Africa is deteriorating from a culture, structure and agency perspective. The issues are as follows:

• Inability to balance routine maintenance, new projects and growth for real places: ‘Service’ and ‘delivery’ are not seen as two missions that can benefit from quality execution. Since their conflation into ‘service delivery’ the phrase is more of a political statement exemplifying point scoring. Basically, whether it is at municipal level or provincial level, routine maintenance of roads, robots, servicing drainage systems is a difficult task for the South African public service. Tasks that were once done directly by government departments for reasons to do with regular service routine are now thrown into the outsourcing culture.

• Medium- to long-term planning is good on paper rather than afforded champions and structures to see these through: In South Africa we do not need to be reminded about the aging infrastructure in most municipalities – it is a reality seen in the quality of tap water in some municipalities. There should have been professionals doing projections for growing capacity demands on energy and water. Clearly this was not to be – despite the existence of technical units within local and provincial government, and huge national departments and Commissions existing to support these specialisations. South Africa is seen aspiring and punting 4IR aligned ways of doing things, including acquiring health equipment that cannot be sustained locally. Even innovation and advancement is not planned from the point of view of sustainability and carefully funding national capability.

• Professionalism is not receiving continuous attention within institutions and in monitoring and evaluation approaches: South Africa is wrestling with a huge human resource bill with many sitting in positions where they lament capacity. Studies are yet to be done to ascertain the lag between capacity and capability – given the changing world of work and the need for dynamic systems to respond to issues. Many academic institutions share amazing potential solutions to everyday problems – solutions for which public administration is not ready because of its unchanging formats. In fact, academic institutions, which are sometimes blamed for not preparing students for the (changing) world of work, have reason to suspect that public administration wants to tame the critical innovative thinkers they produce into imbibing the archaic formatted processes that are not changing with the times.

• Data-driven, evidence-based approaches have purged all qualitative, context-driven service: Communities are suffering from an impersonality of service and systems that refuse to offer human service. Tele-systems with voice prompts and generic emails are supposedly ‘servicing’ people with nuanced problems, and there is no way to follow-up on issues. Things may be reported to human professionals in certain locations but they ultimately find themselves as data in impersonal systems. Recent talk of special relief social grant applicants accessing the internet to supply or change their details, as well as connect with banks – is an amazing case of middle-class consciousness imposed on poor people, most of whom are in rural areas and informal settlements. Clearly South Africa has blunted its capability to respond to real people in real time through its devaluing of qualitative experience. ‘Service’ has removed ‘the person’ on either end of the need-and-service spectrum. This exacerbates alienation and bitterness towards public service establishments.

• Cycles of planning away poverty are an end in themselves: No country speaks of planning and reporting more than South Africa. The only problem is that the physical impact does not match the planning and reporting. Instead it does seem that the plans have certain descriptors that have lost ‘feeling’ and ‘lost entitlement for change’. One of them is reference to ‘the poor’. No descriptor legitimises planning, conferencing and reporting, than the concept of ‘the poor’; but the static nature of numbers and criteria forcing people to remain poor in order to access help is an inbuilt conundrum of South African planning.

A question has to be asked as to whether a typical South African public service manager would be scared for their job if they woke up to ‘no poor people’. The point is: If public service mainly exists to ‘solve poverty’ then developing countries actually do not want to be developed. I am making this point because it seems there is no aspiration for ‘quality of service’, ‘solving poverty’, ‘creating a service blend suitable for circumstance’, or ‘growing development precincts in real spaces’ in South Africa. public servants are working on reducing people to data and generating overlays of faceless needs.

This speaks to the ethos, ethics and culture of public service locally and the public administration system internationally. Let me be blunt about this point: there has never been freedom from colonial formats of public administration because it is in the interest of certain global bodies to find docile public service in African countries. Their ‘poor’ is the less dynamic systems in developing countries. This is what I call the qualitative colonial dividend.

In conclusion

Of course, no one wants to over-emphasise bad news but a deterioration of public service is one of the notable trends of post-independence in many African countries. Why is it that a professional layer of government is not able to salvage its country, and we all blame the politicians? The reasons are both structural and related to devaluing professionalism. An over-arching culture of formats importation that structure the relationship between the globe and former colonies speaks to structural colonial dividends to be gained from dysfunctional public administration regimes. The colonial dividends strategy seems to be: ‘Beyond making countries beg for foreign investment, tame their tools and call that “a request for a permitting environment” – then excessively format the way they work’.

Let me end by specifying the real sore points that must to be sorted if we are to resuscitate the South African public service:

• We need to sort human resource systems and practices: Currently HR recruitment systems are not versatile and they discourage agility in their recruitment criteria. There are no mechanisms to assess the capable “butterflies” that have been bravely hopping between related sectors. The people who hold the answer to the responsive leadership and discretion are often punished for not being stagnant.

• A need to resolve the capacity vs capability debacle: Responsive capability is curtailed by valorising already existing ways of doing things in spite of a technology mix that may be afforded, a possibility of designing new cross-sector policies that allow different specialists to work together, of retraining needed to respond to new situations.

• Speaking truth to powers of vigilance – that should be supporting core business: No matter how versatile public service can be in response to developmentalism, if the disciplines that see their role as vigilance over resources are only operating from the stance of distrust, there shall be no responsiveness. These disciplines are Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, as well as Finance and Auditing. In South Africa they are famous for stating ‘why things cannot be done’ rather than ‘how they can be done’. If this will change, they will need to see sector partners as equal partners with essential expertise for advancing the development mission. These ‘disciplines of vigilance’ may even create accountable discretionary points closer to the coalface instead of only recognising a priori planning-based expenditure even for unforeseen situations.

Finally, someone needs to whisper to all future presidents, especially for their State of the Nation Addresses (SONA), that: “it is OK to prioritise and pinpoint focal areas when it comes to designing an annual strategic direction”. SONAs actually endorse silos. In South Africa even cameras will point to a specific minister as the President jumps from one sector to the next. Being issue-based and resolving major developmental conundrums that have a spiralling effect on other issues is the way to go. SONAs are short, but they can garner determination towards a well-considered mission.

News Archive

Statement on protest at the UFS

2005-03-04

Following a protest by student and non-student organisations today, the management of the University of the Free State (UFS) would like to place the following facts on record:

1. There is a well-documented process underway to further transform the UFS. At the official opening of the UFS on 4 February 2005 , the Rector and Vice-chancellor, Prof Frederick Fourie, announced that the UFS would draft a comprehensive Transformation Plan to guide the next phase of transformation at the institution.

The UFS appeals to student formations, staff associations, trade unions and other role-players to make a constructive input into this Transformation Plan.

The UFS management has been - and always will be - willing to engage with role-players and is prepared to do so even after today’s protest.

2. There is thus no regulation or policy prescription which separates students in hostels according to race.

The reality is that students exercise their freedom of choice as to which hostel they wish to be placed in. This was agreed upon by black and white students in 1997/8.

However, the unintended consequence and practice of this hostel placement policy has been that students themselves have tended to choose to stay in hostels which have over time become black hostels and white hostels.

This is a matter of concern for the management of the UFS as such a situation does not promote interaction across language, cultural and socio-economic groupings of students.

This matter is receiving attention and an intensive consultative process, which will include students, will be launched to review this policy.

The management is convinced that such interaction will enhance the learning experience of all students and sensitise them to the reality of a multicultural South Africa and a multicultural world.

3. No student organisation has been banned from operating at any of the three campuses of the UFS.

In the past few weeks, SASCO, the Young Communist League and the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) have held meetings on all three campuses, namely the Qwaqwa campus, the Vista campus and the main campus.

There are also regular interactions between top management and the leadership of SASCO and the ANCYL on campus.

In fact, the UFS upholds the right of students and staff to associate freely and to organise themselves as they see fit.

The UFS also upholds the rights of staff and students to engage in legal and peaceful protests.

The management however remains committed to discussing issues that affect staff and students in a constructive manner and appeals to student organisations in this case to engage with management.

4. The issues of registration, fees, debt and financial aid are continually monitored, and interventions to assist students are made regularly. To assist as far as possible those academically deserving students who face financial difficulties, the UFS management has put in place a structure called the Monitoring committee that includes management and student representatives.

The purpose of the Monitoring Committee is to review the cases of individual students to determine how best they can be assisted.

This applies to the Qwaqwa campus, the Vista campus and the main campus.

It is generally the case that students who perform academically will not have any difficulty in obtaining financial assistance. However, according to the requirements of National Student Financial Scheme, students who perform poorly will have difficulty in obtaining such assistance.

5. With regard to student governance, the process to institute an inclusive Central Student Representative Council (SRC), on which all three campuses will be equitably represented, was launched in July 2004, and a preliminary constitution has just been drafted. At the same time an inclusive process to review certain elements of the constitution of the main campus SRC was initiated at the end of 2004. This process, which includes all relevant student organisations and structures, is planned to produce an outcome within the next couple of months.

6. There is no policy at the UFS that is based on racism or that discriminates on the basis of the race of students and staff.

As part of the building of a new institutional culture within the broader transformation process, the UFS management is determined to eradicate all elements of racism that may occur on its campuses, and has already instituted inclusive forums on campus to discuss the issue of values and principles for a non-racial university.

Issued by: Mr Anton Fisher
Director: Strategic Communication
Cell: 072 207 8334
Tel: (051) 401-2749
4 March 2005

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