Public service is the heart of the strategic and operational compass of any country. Whereas politics is in the space of driving the national vision, socio-economic positioning of a country and consolidating the symbolic essence of a nation, the public service is the heartbeat of monitoring strategy against present coalface realities.
Political leadership can successfully focus on visioning if its relationship with public administration is healthy. This means professionals capable of advising on strategic scenarios to achieve a political vision, and fine-tuned professionalism for the everyday service experience of the citizen as they tap into government products to assist living and livelihoods.
A healthy relationship is one that has sufficient thresholds of expertise, operational agility, ethics and visioning for both political office-bearers and public servants. Mutual respect for vision and professionalism influences each other. It must be a tango of political and professional strategising that happens best when the country has a fair degree of patriotism amongst its stakeholders, including business.
Sadly, in recent years in South Africa there is very little good news regarding the performance of the public service. Of course, some within a largely failing system are trying hard to do their best. Yet public service and public administration is deteriorating from a culture, structure and agency perspective.
South Africa’s state points to among the following issues: Inability to balance routine maintenance, new projects and growth for real places: “Service” and “delivery” are not seen as two missions that can benefit from quality execution. Since their conflation into “service delivery” the phrase is more of a political statement exemplifying point scoring. Tasks previously done directly by government departments for reasons to do with regular service routine are now thrown into the outsourcing culture.
Medium to long-term planning is good on paper rather than afforded champions and structures to see these through: In South Africa we do not need to be reminded about the aging infrastructure in most municipalities – it is a reality seen in the quality of tap water.
Cycles of planning away poverty are an end in themselves: No country speaks of planning and reporting more than South Africa. The only problem is that the physical impact does not match the planning and reporting. Instead, it does seem that the plans have certain descriptors that have lost “feeling” and “lost entitlement for change”.
One of them is reference to “the poor”. No descriptor legitimises planning, conferencing and reporting, than the concept of “the poor”; but the static nature of numbers and criteria forcing people to remain poor in order to access help is an inbuilt conundrum of South Africa’s planning.
Speaking truth to powers of vigilance – that should be supporting core business: No matter how versatile public service can be in response to developmentalism, if the disciplines that see their role as vigilance over resources are only operating from the stance of distrust, there shall be no responsiveness.
) Prof Pearl Sithole is vice-principal of academic and research at the Qwaqwa campus of the University of the Free State (UFS).
