TREVOR MANUEL RAISES SOME LEGITIMATE POINTS BUT IS NOT BEING TOTALLY HONEST IN HIS ASSEMENT OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE WEAKNESSES

NEHAWU views the Planning Minister,Trevor Manuel's statements on service delivery challenges as hypocritical and insincere. On Wednesday, Cde Trevor Manuel chastised ANC members employed in government for what he called their loyalty to the party at the expense of South Africans.

While Cde Trevor Manuel raises some valid and indisputable points about the need to improve service delivery, fighting corruption and also of serving South Africans irrespective of their political persuasion, he is not being totally honest. He intentionally conflates issues by creating an impression that the weaknesses of government are as a results of ANC members working in government. He is also not being honest when he wants us to pretend that apartheid never existed. His statement that we cannot "blame everything on apartheid anymore" is dishonest.

What he forgot to mention was that the current government has spent the last couple of years trying to reverse some of the disastrous policy positions that he championed as the Minister of Finance. Our members who work in the health sector have experienced first-hand the consequences of neoliberal policies that were adopted seventeen {17} years ago.

He was a big proponent of neoliberal macro-economic policies that resulted in years of a jobless economic growth. He supported privatisation, outsourcing and public-private-partnerships that have proven disastrous for service delivery and have exacerbated the problem of corruption in the public sector.

He was an enthusiastic advocate of a lean and mean state that weakened government structures and left some departments with no clear human resource strategies. In the health sector, this has resulted in the reduced capacity for the public sector to deliver the required services.

We must remember that between 1996 and 2007 the spending on the public health care system decreased. This led to vacant posts not being filled, infrastructure not being maintained and spending on consumables such as laundry being reduced. Some services that were seen as not being core, such as catering, cleaning and security were outsourced.

Although ,since 2007 there has been some improvements in spending, there is still a challenge of trying to reverse the damage which was done during the period of limited spending.

We certainly cannot pretend that apartheid never existed because we are still dealing with its socio-economic effects today.The failure of the government's land reform policy is a clear case of how arduous it is to reverse a colonial and apartheid legacy. It is therefore disingenuous for Manuel to ignore the fact that land reform is an anti-colonial struggle. Land reform is the key that will unlock rural development and also deliver employment opportunities to the country's mostly poor communities in the rural areas.

Affirmative action and cadre deployment were adopted to ensure that all centres of power were demographically representative and also to drive the much needed transformation of the apartheid state. The African National Congress contests the elections and as a governing party it has a responsibility to ensure that it deploys people who will implement its policies that have been endorsed by the electorate.

It is hard not to draw the conclusion that behind this apparently new found "service delivery activism" from Trevor Manuel lurks some political frustration. He has always preferred to be the one who sets the agenda. When the pre-2007 attempts to erode the supremacy of Luthuli House failed as attempted Thabo Mbeki's presidency, he got disillusioned. His decision to refuse the nomination to the ANC NEC was just a ploy to get out of the confines of the collective leadership and continue to act as an independent maverick.

NEHAWU is clear that there are serious challenges facing the public sector and hopes that all stakeholders will focus on improving service delivery in order to liberate the poor from economic bondage. This can only be achieved when people are honest in diagnosing service delivery challenges and are not nit-picking for point scoring purposes.

Statement issued by Sizwe Pamla, NEHAWU Media Liaison Officer, April 5 2013

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter