Public Works Department stable, but much more work to do says Minister

Yesterday's meeting with the Select Committee on Economic and Business Development saw the Department of Public Works (DPW) brief MPs on its Strategic Plan and Annual Performance Plan. However, the discussion between the Committee and the DPW revealed more than just the targets and budget expenditure for the year ahead.

Minister of Public Works, Thulas Nxesi, and Deputy Minister Jeremy Cronin accompanied the DPW’s delegation. Minister Nxesi said that he wanted “to provide a strategic overview of where we are as a department”, which included a brief statement on the DPW’s turnaround strategy.

2012 saw the coming together of a 7-year plan to rebuild the DPW. “The plan envisages three phases. The first phase being stabilisation, the second being efficiency enhancement, and the third being sustainable development,” said the Minister.

According to Minister Nxesi, the stabilisation phase was necessitated by the “poor performance of the DPW and the lack of adequate management and financial controls”, which culminated in eight years of adverse audit findings and high levels of fraud and corruption, as was also evident in the reports by the Public Protector and the SIU.

But, it was not all doom and gloom. Two years into the plan, the DPW has stabilised core businesses areas such as the leases, immovable asset register and the finances, says the Minister.

However, the Minister warned – “we have stopped the bleeding, but it doesn’t mean the patient is well… we have just moved out of the ICU”. He assured the Committee that although it has been a huge task to impose proper financial controls within the DPW, MPs could expect a much better audit outcome for the 2013/14 financial year.

“We do not believe there are any short cuts to good governance and compliance,” said the Minister, adding, “But a word of caution, we were able to stabilise the Department by in-sourcing skills that we learnt. The priority now is to consolidate the work of the stabilisation phase. For this reason we have implemented a programme to ensure that skills are transferred and we build capacity in-house.”

The DPW has been using a few companies, but mostly interns to do the work. This is being done on a contract basis. The focus of the next five years will be on the second phase of the 7-year plan – efficiency enhancement. “This involves operationalising a structure that aligns with the mandate of the Department,” says Minister Nxesi.

However, the Minister advised the Committee that the reason the Department was still struggling was because of outsourcing skills and privatisation. As a result, a lot of built environment officials left the Department and came back as consultants. “This is what has drained Public Works… why we don’t have skills today,” he said.

He said that the relationship between the National Department of Public Works, the provincial public works departments and municipalities could be described as “mutually interdependent”; yet, many people still think that the provinces and municipality jobs are the DPW’s responsibility. “This is not our responsibility constitutionally; it is the responsibility of someone else” said the Minister.

Nevertheless, the Minister argued that there was not any legislation that forced the three to work together, “unless you are talking about intergovernmental issues and so on. Sometimes it depends on province to province. That is why we are talking about a Public Works Act - that is going to be very important”.

Addressing the contentious issue that the Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) does not create long-term jobs, the Minister stated, “I don’t think there is any dispute about these short-term jobs … this is a commitment to the people of the country, which I take very seriously. We are expanding the EPWP both quantitatively and qualitatively. Some of these jobs are not just short term… some of these jobs can be long term.”