Major reforms to the public service are on the way: But is Minister Sisulu biting off more than she can chew?

The Minister of Public Service and Administration came into the new-year firing broadsides at corruption and incompetence in the public service.  A ban on public servants doing business with the state, a new school of government, and a central tribunal to process disciplinary matters faster are but some of the many reforms Minister Sisulu has in the wings.   

Without a skilled, accountable and professional civil service the plan to build a capable state is a pipedream. Let there be no confusion about that. The National Development Plan says plainly that South Africa needs to build a professional public service at all levels that serves government, but is sufficiently autonomous to be insulated from political patronage. To achieve that goal, we need to attract highly skilled people and cultivate a sense of professional common purpose and a commitment to developmental goals. The public service must become a career of choice for graduates who wish to contribute to the development of the country, and ensure that high level staff are recruited on the basis of their suitability for the job.

The alternative would be a rentier public service that is captured by privateers as their personal booty, with pockets of excellence surviving here and there but under siege.  There are signs that this dynamic has taken root in several provinces and many municipalities already, and in some of these there is a dangerous convergence between rent-seeking, violence, and party factionalism.  Unfortunately for Sisulu, the statistics are starting to look like game and match to the rentiers:     

• It is estimated that in 2009 government corruption totalled R 70 billion. In 2010, an audit firm BDO estimated that the total annual leakage from fraud, theft and corruption amounted to R100 billion.
• The then head of the Special investigating Unit (SIU) Willie Hofmeyr told parliament in 2012 that between R25 Billion and R30 Billion of government's annual procurement budget alone was lost to corruption, incompetence and negligence.
• The Consolidated General Report on National and Provincial Audit outcomes for 2011-12 reveal that R24.8 billion has been lost to unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful spending by provincial departments and entities.  Adding the R11 billion in unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure revealed in the 2010-11 Audit Outcomes on Local Government, the wastage amounts to just less than R40 billion.
• The Report also reveals that contracts to the value of R579 million were entered into with suppliers in which civil servants or their close family had an interest. This represents an increase from R136 million identified in the previous year.
• There was also unfair and uncompetitive bidding in 50% of auditees, an increase from 42% in the previous year.

Sisulu plans to advance on a very broad front:  First, she will attack the feed trough directly, cutting off the source of rents, by enacting legislation to prohibit civil servants from doing business with government, a proposal first floated by Richard Levine of the Public Service Commission.    

Second, she is going to amend the Public Service Act to set a higher bar for appointment into the service, career development, fighting corruption and managing discipline. A Public Service Charter will set out the commitments of the state and the public servants to enhance productivity and fast track service delivery.  The Minister also plans to professionalise the public service by standardising the recruitment of accounting officers and senior managers across all levels of government. All new public servants will have to pass through a special induction programme.

Third, the regulatory and oversight machinery will be strengthened. The proposed Public Service Amendment Bill will extend the Commission's jurisdiction to local government, currently it is confined to national and provincial administrations. A new Presidential Remuneration Commission will review the remuneration and conditions of service of all state employees.  An Office of Standards and Compliance will be established to promote compliance with regulatory frameworks and set norms and standards. An Anti-Corruption Bureau within the Ministry will assist departments with investigations and disciplinary hearings of corruption related misconduct cases. A National Discipline Coordination Unit will ensure uniformity in the sanctions imposed for wrongdoing across all spheres of government. And PALAMA will become a School of Government to train public servants.  

These are big ticket, long term reforms in a sector that went to sleep after Fraser-Moleketi's tenure came to an end. Sisulu may have the tough temperament and doggedness this job requires, but those qualities won't be enough.  The public service is a behemoth full of inertia and there are many many vested interests. Changing course will not be straightforward and it will take time for results to show, notwithstanding Sisulu's declared intention to outperform the 2030 timeframe set in the National Development Plan.  

Experience shows that even with a powerful minister leading from the front with her party four-square behind her, other ingredients are needed for long term policy reform to work.  One, very strong policy management capability is need to drive a reform process that will roll out over multiple terms of government.  That will require a team of senior officials with real power, lots of experience and nous to navigate these waters.  

And even with that team in place, she is going to need control over the strategic levers of reform in a context where a lot of policy control sits with other national departments (let alone with alliance partners).  There are really two public services in the country, one for national and provincial departments, another for local government, and only part of the public service sits with her department.  Indeed there are three legislative regimes applying to the `public service'.

There is the Public Service Act administered by DPSA that applies to the national and provincial administrations. Municipal administration is governed by local government legislation that is administered by CGTA. The third element in the equation is the public finance regime applying to all three spheres, which is administered by National Treasury. Then there are the sector departments with their own legislation - such as education and health.

To drive change, DPSA will have to build and lead a coalition of these and other national departments. Simply saying its in the NDP will only take things so far. And the effort involved in coordinating common effort among different national departments with their own mandates is often the place where big reforms run out of steam before they get started.

Does Sisulu have the capability she needs on call in her department and will the cabinet cluster she chairs be enough for her to carve out the path and get others to follow over more than one term?  She needs to, because reforms that run across terms of government must bed down in institutions and processes and budgets. 

If past trends are anything to go on, making bold statements is the easy part of this.  Where is the budget and resources to make this happen? Bold statements can lead to reckless policy making that is not based on sound data or matched to delivery capability. Minister Shiceka was no sooner in office than he had announced a national turnaround strategy for local government and a national operation to achieve clean audits in municipalities by 2014.

At the same time as he introduced this major reform he dismantled his department and rebuilt it from the ground up, without any obvious improvement in capability today.  Neither policy was viable from the start because the objectives were unrealistic and unachievable.

Sisulu should heed lessons about how long it took past reforms of this kind to achieve, well, precisely nothing.  According to our own calculations it took an average of 15 years for three major reforms - the single public service, REDS, and land use management legislation - to go from design to abandonment (in the case of the first two) and a draft bill (in the case of the latter). The single public service was a DPSA initiative that died in 2008 and was resurrected at the most recent ANC policy conference.   

Shouldn't we use 15 years as a reasonable predictor of how long it will take to establish this new regime?  Why should this raft of major reform come in under that limit?  And if we assume 15 years to be a reasonable proxy of the length of time it is going to take to get the formal design and establishment work done on the new regime, then it could be 2028 before any results start to show, that is, 2 years before the expiry of the NDP timeline.  

These reality checks should not dissuade the Minister, whose willingness to tackle problems in the public service head on must be welcomed and supported.  But she would do well to base her plans on government's actual record with large scale reforms in recent years, rather than on good ideas, and to plan for what she can actually deliver. She must look at the reasons why the other policies have failed and learn from them, build solid capability to lead reform and move in a surgical strike, rather than on a broad front.  We have five suggestions to make:

First, the minister should start by implementing the existing public service legislation under her control with more determination before introducing a brand new regime.  We know there is a problem getting ministers to review the performance of DGs. Table a quarterly report to cabinet on ministers who do not do their performance reviews of their DGs and on DGs who have not signed performance contracts. Fire senior civil servants who persistently do not comply with disclosure regulations as required by law, starting with DGs.  If ministers look silly in front of their peers and DGs feel the heat, that may give them an incentive to start cracking the whip to get the lower ranks in line.

Second, set up a national disciplinary tribunal presided over by a retired judge to shorten the time it takes to get the rotten apples out of government, and make it a disciplinary offence for any department head or municipality to employ a public servant who is dishonourably discharged from service.  It beggars belief why the ANC and government would squander equity with the public by redeploying scoundrels elsewhere in the state.  

By doing these first two things purposefully and relentlessly, the minister will win the public's trust and buy wriggle room in which to build capability and set in motion the bigger reforms she wants to do.  Done relentlessly, those actions alone will start looking like victories of some kind in the war against corruption and incompetence.  

Third, DPSA must regularly publish data on every aspect relating to the performance of the public service at all three levels.  Maximum transparency is government's friend. This will rally the research community in particular and steady public debate by introducing accurate data. The Public Service Commission does sterling work in this regard, but an annual report is not enough. Government itself needs to release quarterly reports on select indicators and there should be an annual three line whip debate in parliament on the state of the public service.  

Why do we have this kind of debate on the budget but not on the capacity of the organization that must spend it? Information on local government is particularly scarce. Other than National Treasury's local government budget review, which is published every two years, government publishes practically no information on the state of local government and intergovernmental relations. Local government and intergovernmental relations legislation, however, provide for the national and provincial governments to report on these matters. There hasn't been a single national report issued under this legislation in the Zuma term.

Fourth, the Minister must fast track the s100 intervention legislation.  The Limpopo intervention was a fiasco. Part of the problem is that there is a great deal of uncertainty about who is responsible for what when there is an intervention.  It is also unclear how budgeting for interventions takes place.  National and provincial department have little capability to use these powers effectively. The uncertainty should be cleared up.  An added problem is that this legislative process is currently under the control of CGTA, not DPSA.  

Finally, big sticks are not enough. Over the longer term the Minister must work assiduously to build the prestige of the public service and invest in innovation.  When last was a public servant awarded one of the presidential awards for service to the country?

The public service must come to see itself as  - yes - an elite (not elitist) corps, disciplined by its own value-based traditions and the rule of law.  The key thrust of reform must be to catalyze a professional culture in which the good people that are in service make it uncomfortable for the rent seekers and rotten apples to stay. Why not encourage public servants to form their own professional association that sets and polices higher standards of professionalism for its members?

An advisory council comprised of senior and experienced former civil servants could be set up to advise the minister on what has worked elsewhere to improve productivity.  Not professors, but people who have actually run departments.  In the long run, she could consider creating special incentive-based regimes that incentivize well-run departments to move to higher pay scales and less onerous regulation in exchange for higher standards of probity and oversight, including direct citizen monitoring of performance.  Is it not feasible to think about creating an "Angies list" type of public rating system for certain public services?  

The debate on political deployments has reached an impasse. For the present, political appointment is unlikely to go away. But undue political influence in administration must be limited in the interests of effective and accountable administration. So why not regulate political deployments and make the deployment process more transparent?

Let the Public Service Commission set criteria for political deployment.  Require political parties to identify a pool of deployees fitting the criteria and then make deployments only from within that pool.  Parliament could even play some role in the appointment of DGs, because if the process is political anyway, then at least make it public and transparent, rather that the hidden decision of executive and party it is currently.     

Things like these can probably be done.  But the keys to success will be the surgical strike, building capability, keeping strategic focus, getting civil servants behind the reform process from the start and, by taking relentless and visible action against the corrupt and incompetent in her administrations, convincing us, the public, that these reforms are not more slogans and genuine victories are actually possible.  We wish you good luck, minister.

Derek Powell heads the Multi Level Government Initiative of the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape. Phindile Ntliziywana is a Doctoral researcher in the Multi Level Government Initiative.

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