Hon Chairperson, hon members of the House, Cabinet colleagues, hon chairperson and members of the Portfolio Committee on Public Service and Administration, the portfolio leadership in the Ministry of Public Service and Administration, the leadership of our trade union movement present here, the hon Minister for Public Functions from the Democratic Republic of Congo Minister Botoro Bodias, our distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is always expected that when we have debates of this kind, we should also reflect on figures in terms of rands and cents.
For our combined budget of R596 million, the year-to-date expenditure is 16%, 13%, and 25% for DPSA, Palama and PSC respectively, which gives us the end-of-year projection of 96%. The message from this is that we are therefore sure that we will spend our budget by the end of the financial year.
We are on a journey for good governance and effective service delivery to consolidate our long-held view of realising a developmental state in a proudly South African style, responsive to the needs of our people. Our main focus is to ensure the realisation of a long-held desire of creating a better life for all South Africans, for a better Africa and for a prosperous world. We have been on this journey for the past decade and a half, and on this journey we have achieved more of the things we set ourselves to do and, of course, we have plans to continue to do more.
The Public Service is our guiding map on this journey of rebuilding our country, our Africa and our world. We have since learnt that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be complete dedication to the people and to the nation, with the full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy. As we will elucidate later in terms of details as to the footprints of our service delivery records, we want to state upfront that we acquitted ourselves well - close to the realisation of the goals we set for ourselves, given that we operate and operated in an environment polluted over many years of apartheid rule that ran an agenda of a fragmented public service, whose main mandate was to implement the oppressive policies of that evil system.
I cannot help but agree with Professor Sangweni, who recited his poem "Our Journey" at his farewell function a few days ago, when he said:
I cast my eyes to from where we have come, I stand amazed at what we have done, So little did we know, The bright legacy that we would grow.
A few days ago, as part of Africa Public Service Day, we celebrated our achievements as a nation over the past 15 years of democracy in our country. It was an exciting moment to note that more has been done, and, importantly, that we committed ourselves confidently that we have plans to take the process of service delivery forward.
Even today, we will account to the nation through this august House in terms of effective governance and service delivery, and we say to Parliament: Hold us accountable for the issues we commit ourselves to doing today.
You may agree with me, Chairperson, that it was not a simple task for us, but we championed our course nonetheless. We can take a cue from this in that, sharing with his fellow commissioners at his farewell function a few days ago and in his poem "Our journey", Professor Sangweni said the following:
Our path was one of strife, A common goal we had to drive, Expectations of us were high From our vision we did not shy.
The question we have is what the secrets are that account for the implementation of programmes we set for ourselves as a nation. The answer to this question lies in the Xitsonga idiomatic expression, which goes: "Ximinta ntsengele xi tshembe nkolo." [Whatever you do, whether good or bad, you should be able to bear the consequences thereof.]
A few days ago, as part of Africa Public Service Day, we celebrated and acknowledged the critical and sterling role public servants in this country have played - and continue to play - in the transformation, reconstruction and development of the country and the Public Service. We also paid homage to the significant role of an effective and efficient Public Service in building our society and the economy. We must remember that democracy and successful governance are built on the foundation of a competent civil service.
We have gone a long way in addressing the social needs of our people by providing decent shelter, water, electricity, health care facilities, schools, social security services, houses, roads infrastructure - the list is long. But more still needs to be done, and we have plans to do more.
We would not have done these things and we would not do more if we did not have responsive, dedicated and committed public servants who are motivated, willing and capable of carrying out our developmental mandate.
Our public servants share experience as they pull along together as they champion the course for effective service delivery. We say in Xitsonga:
"Ti tlhomana mincila ti korhokela tiko. Hikwalaho hi vulaka leswaku loko hi ku ximita ntsengele xi tshemba nkolo, hi vula leswaku mfumo wa humelela eka pfhumba ra wona hikokwalaho ka vatirhela-mfumo. Ntsengele a yi nga ta swi kota ku tlimba minkolo ya mfumo loko vatirhela-mfumo va tirha hi ku hetiseka."(Translation of Xitsonga paragraph follows.)
[They jerk up one another to deliver services to the nation. That is why we are saying that whatever you do, whether good or bad, you should be able to face the consequences, and we mean that the government is successful in its initiative through the effort of the public servants. There won't be any major stumbling blocks on the part of the government if the public servants are performing their tasks effectively and efficiently.]
We will not fail to deliver the quality services that we identified for ourselves if our public servants are ready to internalise their obligation to implement, to the best of their abilities, the policies of the government.
Today we can safely pronounce that over the past 15 years, working together with our people and supported by our public servants, we have firmly laid the building blocks for service delivery, and we march along the path of service delivery for all.
In punctuating our record of service delivery and rolling out our future plans for effective governance today, we will focus on the work of the Department of Public Service and Administration; the Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy, commonly known as Palama; the Centre for Public Service Innovation; the State Information Technology Agency, commonly known as Sita; the Public Service Commission; the Government Employees Medical Scheme; and the Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority. I will mirror this punctuated work in seven areas of focus, namely: policy- making, capacity-building, quality service delivery, improvement of conditions of service, partnership for participative governance, further transformation of the Public Service, and international participation.
For 15 years, our government has set policies that are meant to strengthen the state to be in a position to deliver in terms of our mandate, thus we have policy documents for dealing with all line-function activities of the government, with a view to promote the following basic values and principles of our administration, applicable in all three spheres of our government, organs of state and public entities.
These values are the following: promoting a high standard of professionalism; promoting efficient, effective and economic use of resources; ensuring a development-oriented Public Service; ensuring that services are provided impartially, fairly, equitably and without bias; building a responsive and participatory Public Service; promoting an accountable public administration; and promoting an inclusive Public Service, denoting a sound demographic reflection.
Subsequently, further policy documents and enabling legislation were developed to give effect to these constitutional provisions, such as the promulgation of the Public Finance Management Act, applicable at provincial and national government level, as well as the Local Government: Municipal Finance Management Act. These pieces of legislation replace the apartheid- drawn Exchequer and Audit Act, and they provide uniform legislative instruments to ensure the sound management of financial resources of our government. Of course, these pieces of legislation marked the introduction of the intervention to improve financial management.
A priority for us going forward on this journey of sound financial management is to ensure that all public servants come to terms with the provisions of these pieces of legislation, and the instrument of measure for the realisation of this priority is government departments reflecting no qualifications when they are audited.
Through Palama and other interventions, such as those recently announced by the Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, we have programmes meant to respond to this situation as part of tailor-made courses available for our public servants across the spheres. It is necessary to indicate that the compulsory performance agreements that each public servant should have, will, where applicable, include an item on financial management.
In order to implement the constitutional provision for providing services impartially, fairly, equitably and without bias, and also to be accountable and participative, we introduced a policy document for effective service delivery, called Batho Pele, simply meaning putting people first.
After 15 years now, we know that the challenges we face in dealing with policy matters are in their implementation, and our plan to respond to these challenges is to make an effort to understand the nature of difficulties in the implementation process.
The Public Service Commission has conducted a lot of investigations as to the compliance profile of government departments, and in subsequent reports, the commission pointed at certain observations that departments should do and they put them forward as recommendations.
The Batho Pele policy is no exception to this reality. Unfortunately, some departments do not comply with the recommendations of the PSC. It is time that we enter into an agreement that enforces compliance. This we can achieve if we attach a timeframe for the response to the commission's report. And I believe that hon members here will internalise that as their responsibility to ensure that when the Public Service Commission produces and submits the report to Parliament, that the report is implemented in terms of the recommendations.
We will engage in a multistakeholder arrangement on this matter of compliance with policy. This will include an assessment on the state of implementability of the policies, and we will report progress by the end of the current financial year.
Palama's massified induction programme makes an effort to orientate the new entrants into our Public Service, so that they understand the culture of our Public Service right from the beginning. The massified induction programme is offered in all 11 official languages, as well as Braille. So far, some 22 500 new public servants have been trained and this is 75% of our target.
In our effort to deal with issues related to strengthening the capacity of the state to deliver in terms of its constitutional and electoral mandate, our recruitment so far focuses on getting those public servants who have the necessary professional requirements for appointment. We read from the year-to-year State of the Public Service report that, at least at senior management level, we have public servants who have an average of two senior degrees. This is commendable. This state of capacity should be reflected in the actual programme of service delivery, but I'm not sure whether this is always the case.
Through its training interventions, Palama also contributes towards further deepening the capacity of our public servants to respond with equal strength to the service delivery challenges. If we couple this with the innovations that the Centre for Public Service Innovations determines from time to time, we may say that we have a well-arranged Public Service capable of delivering in terms of the mandate for a developmental state. In terms of the Skills Development Act, the Public Services Sector Education and Training Authority is firmly in charge of providing skills development interventions.
But our experience of 15 years indicates to us that we should not be complacent, hence our move to identify as a priority the issue of capacity- building, and on this score we will reflect on progress in this matter during the current financial year.
In that reflection, we will pay attention to exactly what constitutes the required merit in our Public Service, but we will not be limited to this. Is it the issue of the chains of degrees that public servants have? Is it the issue of the level of exposure on democratic governance situations? Is it the issue of which institutions our public servants have received their qualifications from? Is it the level of consciousness on the broad objectives of the government of the day? Is it all about a sense of patriotism? To me, it is a combination of so many factors and all these questions are relevant. By the end of the current financial year, the Department of the Public Service and Administration will have further sharpened the recruitment tool that will include all the necessary factors to be considered.
We will also continue with the further transformation of Palama to be positioned to deal with management capacity development in such a manner that we will be assured of the best and relevant interventions ever. In this regard, we will finalise the work started by my predecessor by November this year.
Whereas there is a need to inject new life into our Public Service, with the expectation that such a move would also boost the capacity to deliver, we have identified some barriers to entry into the Public Service, more especially when it comes to those graduates who come from tertiary institutions and do not have the necessary experience that is called for whenever recruitment is done.
We introduced the internship programme to provide space for the graduates to gain some experience in the Public Service. The priority in this regard is the effective management of the programme. The other barrier to entry into the Public Service comes into play when we have graduates who, some people say, are not employable as they do not have the key subjects necessary for consideration. We are proud to announce today that Palama has developed a training programme intended to respond to remove these barriers through a top-up programme to enhance the employment potential of these graduates.
When it comes to quality service delivery, the Batho Pele policy is instructive. And, I believe, hon members are aware of the eight principles of this policy. Our record of 15 years of service delivery is at the core of our central message that together we have done more, and that together we still have to do more.
It has always been a contract between the government and the people in dealing with issues of service delivery. Through izimbizo, we managed to have the executive interact with the citizens and give them feedback on government performance. The issue we identified as a priority was that of our having a detailed follow-up programme on all issues raised at the izimbizo, irrespective of which executive authority had such a peoples' forum.
Before I was appointed a Minister, I used to complain that there was no effective follow up on what the people raise at the izimbizo. I also complained that Members of Parliament were not taken on board when Ministers conducted their gatherings. What I can say today is that we have expanded the scope of an official who deals with executive support to the Minister in order for him or her to be in charge of the public participation follow-up programme, and the parliamentary liaison officer's scope is also expanded to include follow-up on issues raised in Parliament as well as in Parliament's public-participation programmes such as the People's Assemblies and the NCOP programme of taking Parliament to the people.
We have improved the accessibility of services to the people through the establishment of the Thusong centres, which we earlier called multipurpose community centres. In this arrangement, we provide accessibility to services through co-ordination of structures.
Our plan this year is to further strengthen the effectiveness of these Thusong centres by ensuring Internet connectivity. The State Information Technology Agency, Sita, runs a programme to accelerate this service. With this connectivity, citizens will be guaranteed access to information at the click of a button.
Our plan is to ensure that all existing Thusong centres are connected to Internet facilities by the end of the financial year, and that, going forward, there is co-ordinated planning to ensure that each Thusong centre is connected as it is established.
We took the position to improve governance and service delivery through the use of Internet technology, hence the projects e-government and e-cabinet, and so on. Once concluded, these interventions will further strengthen our use of technology. We will communicate our plans on Sita's accelerated turnaround strategy on these programmes by the end of July 2009.
The community development worker programme is a critical intervention that bonds government and the people together. Since inception, we have realised instances in which these foot soldiers of service delivery live up to what is expected of them and soil their hands to unblock obstacles to service delivery. Of course, the programme is vulnerable. There are guidelines for running this programme, but each province has its own arrangement in the location and utilisation of the CDW programme. This, unfortunately, compromises the programme, because, in some instances, the CDWs are used for running the personal programmes of their masters at the expense of what the programme commands them to do. Working together with the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, we have a turnaround plan to attend to this challenge.
The good record of service delivery does not lend us to complacency. We continue to identify areas of improvement in order to maintain our standards, and to develop plans to introduce new ways of doing things so that we maintain the standard of providing service delivery at the same level of public expectation.
We have identified corruption and conflicts of interest as some of the obstacles to quality service delivery. This happens in a situation in which we have created instruments to deal with these tendencies. We have a national anticorruption strategy in our Public Service and we have created a national anticorruption forum, constituted by representatives of government, business and broader civil society formations. So far we have held three anticorruption summits at which we took resolutions to the effect that corruption had to be confronted head-on.
This development comes into effect to bolster such other measures as the Anti-Corruption Act, the Protected Disclosures Act and other instruments. By the end of the current financial year, we will assess the impact of corruption on our Public Service as well as the effectiveness of the interventions we have so far introduced.
Our code of conduct for public servants requires that they declare their interests in business operations, but from time to time we receive reports of conduct outside this prescription. The currently released AG's report attests to this. We will soon address the nation on that aspect. [Applause.]
With regard to the collective bargaining processes, we have managed to produce an agreement through the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council, in terms of Resolution 1 of 2007, that seeks to effect serious changes in the conditions of service of our public servants, including the introduction of occupation-specific dispensations. This is a four-year resolution, at the end of which we are going to assess the impact thereof and decide whether to deal further with any remaining matter.
Over the past 15 years we have managed the relationship between labour and ourselves, as the employer - a caring employer, of course - in such a manner that reasonable stability has been realised in our Public Service, save for what happened in 2007. We have so far conducted a survey on the 2007 strike and we continue to build bridges informed by the lessons we learnt, the hard way of course, during that strike.
We are now piloting an arrangement in which we restructure our negotiation formations, and we will soon introduce a dispensation in which we are going to synchronise the salary negotiations with the government's budget cycle.
We are confident that we are on course to rebuild the trust seemingly lost between us and organised labour. A test case is in the way we manage negotiations to conclude bargaining processes on the implementation of occupation-specific dispensations. We set deadlines together.
By the way, today is the deadline for resolving the disputes in finalising the tabling and signing of the agreements. After this weekend, we will have analysed the report from the bargaining chambers and we will address the nation on the final position by next week. [Applause.] Suffice to say, though, that the latest report - latest as of this morning at 09:55 - on the negotiations is positive that today's deadline will deliver positive results in all categories of professionals, including the health sector. [Applause.]
Soon after that we will also come together to reflect on the approach and the deadline to deal with negotiations related to salaries. I can assure the House that we are not going to have long drawn out bargaining interventions. We will conclude a time-bound programme soon, and communicate to the nation in this regard. The renewed relationship between us and organised labour is further reflected in the agreement to jointly host a Public Sector summit before December this year.
Our Public Service is dynamic and alive to respond to the changing environment, and we can only call on South Africans to appreciate this as it is meant to position the Public Service to deliver quality services for a better life for all the people. The debate on a single Public Service is not dead. By the end of this financial year, we will have tabled a Bill to finally close the debate.
A a hi kokeni hi joko rin'we, swi ta tshamiseka. Ntwanano i matimba! [Let us work together, everything will fall into place. Unity is strength!]
Over the past 15 years, South Africa has reclaimed its place as part of the equal nations of the continent and the world. As we debate here today, the heads of states of the African Union are gathered in Libya to assess, among other things, two countries in terms of the African Peer-Review Mechanism.
As a member state of the AU that acceded to the APRM, we are participating with full status, proudly content with the fact that we went through the peer-review process ourselves and have already submitted our first report of implementing the programme of action that we developed after the review process. Our Deputy Minister is representing us in Libya today as we debate these issues here - because we are the focal point of the country in dealing with APRM issues.
We also participate in several co-operation plans with countries all over the world. We have projects in the DRC through which we implement the policies and decisions of our government. President Zuma made a commitment that we should continue to participate in post-conflict resolution programmes on the continent and in the world. The DRC project is one of them, and we are going to discuss it with Minister Botoro Bodias from the DRC today.
In conclusion, allow me to repeat once again what Professor Sangweni told his colleagues a few days ago at his farewell function through his poem, "Our journey", when he said:
I cast my eyes to from where we have come, I stand amazed at what we have done, So little did we know, The bright legacy that we would grow.
The journey of Public Service is not my journey alone. It is not his journey. It is not her journey. It is our journey. I ndlopfu ya hina! Inkomu! [We are in this thing together! Thank you.] [Applause.]