Joel Netshitenzhe
Article: Letter from Tshwane
28 January 2000
Can Mbeki re-engineer Government?
"What is a Director-General"?
A strange question on something that appears most obvious.
The place is the Union
Buildings: the Management Committee of the Forum of South African
Directors-General (FOSAD) is in a meeting with President Thabo
Mbeki. This is a sequel to the day-long lekgotla that Mbeki
held with all Directors-General (DGs) last August.
At that lekgotla,
the President had posed yet another question: what are the priorities
of government? Strange, because on initial reflection the answer
seemed as obvious. Why, there is the RDP Document, the Election
Manifesto of the ruling party…!
This is the one exciting
thing about the Mbeki era. More than at any other time in the
past five years, government is being forced to think.
The discussion on the
role of DG’s identifies among other things: a manager to
realise government objectives; and the culture of thinking about
all of government work rather than just one’s narrow line
function. And if DG’s are managers of implementation, should
their deployment be a function only of their policy expertise?
And priorities? It is
asserted in discussion that the RDP Document identifies everything
government should do. Prioritisation, rather, means making hard
choices; recognising that in a society with a gigantic social
backlog it would be extremely difficult to say something else
should wait. It also means the ability to translate the President’s
State of the Nation Address and Cabinet’s strategic decisions
into concrete implementation steps.
And so the questions
were not strange, after all; nor were their answers that obvious.
In them is contained
a potent challenge facing government as it seeks to improve people’s
lives in an integrated manner.
There is a quiet revolution here in Tshwane. Zones of certainty carved over the past 5 years
are being shaken at their very foundations.
The other day, at the
President’s Forum with Premiers many ideas were shared on
how programmes in all spheres of government should be mutually
reinforcing.
Naturally, there were
misgivings about whether such a forum represented centralisation
of power and co-option particularly of "non-ANC" provinces.
Now, a comprehensive discussion will be held in the near future
on whether any level of government can meet its obligations alone!
Approach the issue from this perspective, and the question of
formal relations should sort itself out.
In his post-election
State of the Nation Address the President identified a number
of programmes that lend themselves to this style of governance.
Take for instance the
Integrated Rural Development Strategy and the simple example of
a clinic with a road and electricity and water and staff and medicines.
Or the multi-disciplinary approach to dealing with crime in specific
areas by improving people’s conditions while strengthening
the justice system. Without co-operation among departments and
across all spheres, these ideals wouldn’t see the light of
day.
Inter-departmental task
teams on these matters visited the provinces, and debate on actual
implementation took place at the Cabinet lekgotla last
week. Progress on these issues should feature in the President’s
parliamentary address next week.
The reality is that
government has not been geared for this kind of operation. In
1994, we adopted existing Cabinet Committees, while the character
and focus of government had fundamentally changed. Critical programmes
had to be catered for by all kinds of ad hoc committees. The danger
always lurked that a culture could develop that, ‘if you
support my Cabinet Memorandum, I would support yours’. This
naturally lent itself to duplication.
For instance, when the
Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) set out
to establish district Government Information Centres, research
indicated that most departments either had their own separate
district offices or intended to build them. Now Cabinet has decided
that these offices should all be clustered into One-Stop Government
Centres.
One such Centre was
launched in Tombo in the Eastern Cape last December. The experience
of joint work among national, provincial and local government
structures will be duplicated in other districts.
Each of these examples
represents a small step in the direction of re-engineering government
to put the people first (Batho Pele). Collectively they are a
giant leap forward. If there is excitement in Tshwane, it is because
something novel and fresh is abroad.
For all these changes
to be effective requires changing many formal things.
Cabinet Committees should
reflect government’s critical programmes. Cabinet Memoranda
should be at the tail-end of a process that should start with
consultation among clusters of related departments.
A new planning cycle
should be introduced so that the budget strictly reflects strategic
plans. Managers should be able to shape their departments in line
with core functions.
Decisions on most of
these issues were taken by the end of 1999. The planning cycle
was tabled at last week’s Cabinet lekgotla and will
be finalised soon.
So, the silent revolution
is taking concrete shape. In a sense, this creative work has started
to make dreary bureaucratic chores an exciting enterprise in public
service. Here in Tshwane it’s no longer just a question of
"to do and die".
Call it centralisation
or what you will, this government can think. It can tell you what
a Director-General is!
Joel Netshitenzhe
CEO, GCIS
Issued by Government Communication and Information System (GCIS)
Published
in Independent Newspapers
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