Hon Chairperson, hon Minister and colleagues, in the view of the IFP this department and the establishment of the department have been, if nothing else, a wake-up call for all other departments. With the mandate assigned to it by the President of the country in Cabinet, one finds that other departments are now very, very careful about how they tread.
Performance monitoring and evaluation is supposed to be something that each department does on its own. However, that has not been done in the past. The establishment of this department, and the fact that the department "puts its nose", if I may use those words, into other departments and evaluates what they do, is a positive thing. We trust that this will lead to improvement in service delivery as we move forward.
Having said that, let me say that the IFP will support this Budget Vote. We support this Vote because we believe the establishment of this department is positive.
However, I am a bit concerned, and I am glad to notice the Director-General in the Office of the Presidency, Dr Cassius Lubisi, is present here. We would have liked to see the amount that has been allocated to the National Youth Development Agency, NYDA, ring-fenced and placed in Budget Vote No 6. We are the committee responsible for oversight over the NYDA. The Minister responsible for the NYDA is the hon Minister on the right, sitting here. Yet this debate takes place in Budget Vote No 1, the Vote of the President. I hope that the President and Cabinet will consider taking that amount and putting it into Budget Vote No 6 so that we can have a meaningful discussion and debate on the role of the NYDA.
I will probably not have an opportunity to speak in that debate, so I would like to say that NYDA is really coming of age. They are now a responsible group of people, focused on the empowerment of the youth as we move forward. [Applause.]
This department is the custodian of the monitoring and evaluation function in government. One would like to see less reliance on the use of consultants within the department. We know that the department is underbudgeted - in real terms they got less money than they had before - and there are still many challenges that face the department and the government in general.
Among the reports that the department itself has published, one of the reports suggests the following. I quote:
The Department identified that the many HODs are not regularly assessed and key proposals in this regard include the Presidency and Office of the Premiers' (OTPs') intervening if Performance Agreements are not submitted timeously ...
The fact that heads of departments are not being assessed is an indictment on us as government. Rot starts at the top, and if they don't set an example at the top, and if they don't perform in terms of the performance agreements that they signed with the responsible Ministers or with the President, we do not expect people at the bottom to carry out their work effectively. I think this is a challenge that the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation has to address at a global level.
Yes, focusing on the department in regard to what happens on the ground is necessary, but we still think that this department needs to empower all the other departments.
If you look at most of the reports that have been produced by this department, what are the issues that you see? There is nonpayment within 30 days, the lack of service delivery in governments and at municipalities, and the lack of services being offered to people in the offices that they visit. These are all "people issues". There are things like the cleanliness of an office and rudeness in the office. These have been identified in the reports of this department. I don't think that in this day and age we should be accepting a lackadaisical attitude from any civil servant. If they can't shape up, they must ship out.
This brings me, hon Minister, to the fact that whilst we may have all these reports and whilst we may say what the shortcomings are, we need to ask: What follows? What follows is nothing! No action is taken against people who do not comply. Sometimes civil servants think that they are a law unto themselves, that they can sit in their ivory towers and that they can treat citizens like us as people they are doing a favour! We need to ensure that appropriate action is taken!
This should happen, not only at the lowest level, but also with the heads of departments if they are not performing. Open any annual report where we can look at the financial statement and look at the column on performance bonuses. Even if a department has a terrible report from the Auditor- General and there are lots of matters that have been emphasised, you will see performance bonuses being awarded to these people. Why should that be the case? These are transversal issues that we would like the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation to look at.
Chairperson, I now turn to monitoring at the municipal level. The report of the Auditor-General in regard to how municipalities are performing and what we see is shocking, to say the least. I think that if we say that more money should be given to this department, then we must agree that more money should indeed be given to this department so that there is more monitoring and enforcement at that particular level. That is the coalface of delivery, at the municipal level. All the service delivery protests and so on take place because municipalities are not performing! It is not because the national department hasn't fulfilled whatever its mandate was.
I think the shift of emphasis in what the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation does as we move forward is really going to help the citizens of this country and help all of us in ensuring that there is value for money.
Chairperson, I see my bell is ringing. Thank you very much. We will support the Budget Vote. [Applause.]