Cape Town – Public Service and Administration Minister Lindiwe Sisulu says the new school for public servants, which will be launched in October this year, will boost the public sector’s performance.
Briefing the media before delivering her budget vote on Wednesday, Sisulu detailed progress on several initiatives to transform the public sector and to create better performing public servants.
“South Africa deserves an efficient public service and we (the department) are working daily to bring that to your doorstep,” said Sisulu.
The Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy (Palama), which currently oversees the training of public servants, will be transformed into the School of Government through the help of a team of about eight advisors, including academics, some of which are from the public sector.
The school would be set up on October 21 and would provide everything from adult basic education training to higher education courses, and would be registered to carry out the necessary accreditation.
It will run like a business and be customer focused, with participants having to pay tuition fees.
It would be funded using funds from the Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSeta) and from skills development levies drawn from the payrolls of department.
Sisulu said the school would also serve as an incubator of ideas and a catalyst for reform and modernisation of the public service.
In incentivising the creation of model public servants, the department would also run Public Sector Excellence Awards, with the first of its kind to start in September.
Anyone that served with distinction in the public sector over a long period of time would be eligible and nominations would be drawn from the public, said Sisulu.
She said the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust has also pledged to partner with the department by awarding 10 scholarships to outstanding public servants to further their studies either locally or internationally at institutions such as the Harvard School of Government and the Oxford School of Government.
Sisulu said the Public Management Bill, to specify minimum skills and standards in the public sector and set up an office of standards of compliance, had been passed through Nedlac and approved by the State law advisors. It will come before Cabinet next week.
The bill compels those wanting to take up the position of director general or deputy director general to complete an examination.
A director general would have to hold at least a junior degree and post graduate degree, while a deputy director general would have to hold at least a junior degree.
Sisulu said amendments to the Public Service Commission Act, which will empower the Public Service Commission to monitor the performance of accounting officers, would soon be tabled before Parliament.
She said amendments to the Public Service Act, which would prohibit public servants from doing business with the government, were accepted by the Cabinet committee yesterday.
To enforce this measure, the department had set up an Anti-Corruption Bureau, which will go into operation on July 1.
To streamline the annual financial disclosure that public officials are obliged to make, the government would move to using electronic disclosure forms from April next year.
Sisulu said at present, too many officials submitted disclosure forms late, but that the system would be ready to go live next year following pilots in three provinces.
Rooting out corruption
Turning to the State Information Technology Agency (Sita), she said the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) had yet to conclude its investigation into corruption allegations at Sita, which was launched in September last year.
However she pointed out that she was confident that the agency’s turnaround strategy would see Sita develop into an agency able to successfully deliver e-government services.
Sisulu was also attempting to streamline the public sector by cutting out inefficiencies.
She believed the public service was bloated and needed to be pruned – evident by the number of unfunded posts and the number of internal inefficiencies.
She said as her department carried out assessments of the departments over the next three years, that the true number of public servant necessary to operate for an effective public sector would become apparent.
“We are not thinking about large-scale retrenchments,” she cautioned, pointing out that trimming down the public service would hinge more on not renewing contracts for positions that were deemed unnecessary.
Recent investigations by the department into five departments placed under administration in Limpopo had revealed thousands of unfunded posts.
Sisulu said this ranged from the provincial Department of Health, which had 30 868 unfunded posts, to 222 in the provincial Treasury.
None of these posts had been filled yet, but the effect was that it had inflated the vacancy rate and risked leading to wasted funds if these posts were approved for funding.
Sisulu said her department had committed to cleaning up the public sector’s Persal payroll system to remove unfunded posts, and would embark on countrywide clean-up of the system. – SAnews.gov.za
