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21 June 2022 | Story Prof Pearl Sithole | Photo Sonia Small
Prof Pearl Sithole
Prof Pearl Sithole is Vice-Principal: Academic and Research at the Qwaqwa Campus, University of the Free State

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

Verslag: SA studente atletiek (Afrikaans)
2005-04-28

Absa-kovsieatletiek
SA studente atletiekkampioenskap - 22 en 23 April 2005 Johannesburg Universiteit

 

Weereens baie goed!!! Dit is hoe ons die Kovsieatlete se vertonings op en af van die baan af kan beskryf. Die 22 medaljes vanjaar teenoor die 25 van 2004, die 14 van 2003 en die 10 van 2002 spreek boekdele, veral as ons in ag neem dat ons in die laaste week 4 van ons top atlete weens beserings verloor het (Antonie Rossouw, Nico Oosthuizen, Jaco Claasen en Renè Kalmer).

Ons het op 20 April om 09:00 vanaf Pelliespark per bus na Johannesburg vertrek en tuisgegaan in die Randburg Road Lodge hotel.

'n Totaal van 43 atlete – 18 vroue en 25 mans het die Kovsies verteenwoordig (spanlys aangeheg).

Die bestuurspan het bestaan uit Danie Cronjé bestuurder mans, Sarina Cronjé bestuurder vroue, Bertus Pretorius afrigter mans, Ans Botha afrigter vroue, Hendrik Cronjé (Video), Jan du Toit, Sidney van Biljon, DB Prinsloo sportbestuurder.

Die mediese span het bestaan uit Dr. Org Strauss en Daleen Lamprecht(bio).

Die volgende lede van die ABSA KOVSIESPAN het medaljes verwerf.

GOUD    
     
Jan vd Merwe  400   46,37
     
Johan Cronjé    1500 mans   3:50.20
     
Boy Soke  10000   30:23,40
     
Charlene Henning   Driesprong vroue  12.62m
     
Francois Potgieter      Tienkamp  6862 punte
     
Magdel Venter    Diskusgooi vroue     46.94m
     
Kovsiespan mans   4x400 Aflos  3:10,17
     
(Dirk Roets, Francois Lötter, Johan Cronjé, Jan van der Merwe)
     
     
SILWER    
     
Charlene Henning  Verspring vroue    6,16m
     
Magdel Venter  Gewigstoot vroue  13,21m
     
Sanè du Preez   Hamergooi vroue     44,71m
     
Boy Soke     5000m    14:36,60
     
Francois Potgieter  110 Hekkies mans    14,00sek
     
Christine Kalmer  1500m vroue    4:35,40
     
Cobus Marais    3000m hindernis   9:32,80
     
     
BRONS    
     
Gustav Kukkuk     110 Hekkies mans    14.00sek
     
Mariana Banting    Driesprong vroue  12.36m
     
Helen-Joan Lombaard   Sewekamp vroue    3354 punte
     
Clive Wessels   Paalspring   4,05m
     
Johan Cronjé  800m  1:52,01
     
Kovsiespan vroue   4x100 Aflos    47,56
     
(Denise Polson, Elmie Hugo, Carlene Henning, Minette Albertse)
     
Kovsiespan mans    4x100 Aflos   42,21
     
( Tiaan Pretorius, Gustav Kukkuk, Marno Meyer, Wiaan Kriel)
     
     
Kovsies wat ook onder die eerste 8 geëindig het sien as volg daaruit:
     
     
4de Plek    
     
Mariana Banting   Hoogspring vroue  1.70m
     
Stefan van Heerden   Driesprong  15,12m
     
Elmie Hugo   200m   24,12sek
     
Ronè Reynecke     400m  57,31sek
     
     
5de Plek    
     
Jackie Kriel    100 Hekkies    13,90sek
     
Jackie Kriel     400 Hekkies   65,40sek
     
Riana Rossouw    Gewigstoot    10,59m   
     
Kenny Jooste   Verspring   7,23m
     
Elmie Hugo    100m  11,86sek
     
Helen-Joan Lombard  Paalspring    3,25m
     
Ronè Reynecke     800m   2:17,58
     
Christine Kalmer   5000m      17:38,32
     
     
6de Plek    
     
Tiaan Pretorius  Verspring   7,21m
     
Francois Pretorius    800m     1:52,67
     
Riana Rossouw   Spiesgooi      38,12m
     
Kovsiespan vroue   4x400 Aflos  4:06,56
     
(Ronè Reynecke, Denise Polson, Lise du Toit, Elmie Hugo)
     
     
7de Plek    
     
Gerda Rust    Hamergooi   36,37m
     
Schalk Roestoff     1500m      3:55,80
     
Francois Lotter    400m       47,94
     
Pienaar j v Rensburg    10000m   32:12,21
     
Kovsie mans  ”A”  en  B span  4x400     3:15,44
     
     
8ste Plek    
     
Charles le Roux   Verspring   7,06m
     
Tiaan Pretorius  Driesprong  14,06m

In die spankompetisie het die Vroue 4de geëindig en die mans 4de. In die algehele kompetisie het die Kovsies ook die 4de plek behaal (aangeheg).

Die gees en gedrag van die toergroep was uitstekend en was die atlete goeie ambassadeurs vir die Kovsies.

Danie Cronjé     Sarina Cronjé
Spanbestuurder  Mans   Spanbestuurder Vroue

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