Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
simply cannot afford to outsource the government’s key functions while we have permanent civil servants.’
The Times called on the minister of public service and administration to ‘explain the situation’, but Paul Hoffman SC, director of the Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa, was more blunt, saying: ‘The widespread use of consultants is due to the government employing incompetents. People are given jobs that they have no capacity to do.’46
City Press was also outspoken in its condemnation, saying in an editorial:
We, the public, employ around 1.3m public servants. It is a huge figure, one of the highest proportions of civil servants to population in the world. Go to any government department and you will see how much paper shuffling takes place. We spend a lot of money and employ many people in education, in health, and in running the state smoothly, but bang for buck is poor.
There … is [also] a parallel government of consultants doing the work of the 1.3m people for whom we pay R400bn (the state’s wage bill) a year. We are running two payrolls, yet the outcome is not an efficient or effective state …
As in other areas of public life, it appears the state is often fleeced. Double payments, consultants employed to oversee other consultants, and overruns on deadlines are but three [problems which have come to light] … What each case reveals is that the civil servants employed by government do not know how to govern.47
In October 2013 City Press gave some examples of the jobs that consultants had been employed by the state to do. One consultant had been paid R14 million to count cushions and Persian rugs, another had been paid R20 000 to proofread a one-page document, and a third had been paid R14 000 to install a DVD player in a minister’s car. One of the worst examples was the R68 million paid to a consultant to perform the duties of a chief financial officer incapable of doing the job. Still more disturbing was the R4.6 billion paid by the Gauteng health department to several consultants over three years, for the auditor-general was unable to establish whether any of the work had in fact been done.48
So serious is the skills deficit in the public service that recent Global Competitiveness Reports issued by the World Economic Forum have repeatedly flagged ‘an inefficient government bureaucracy’ as one of the ‘most problematic factors for doing business’ in South Africa. In 2008/09, this factor was rated fourth highest out of 15, ranking below obstacles such as ‘crime and theft’ (which ranked second) and ‘an inadequate supply of infrastructure’ (which ranked third). But by 2010/11, South Africa’s inefficient bureaucracy had emerged as the single most problematic of all 15 factors. This remained the case in 2011/12. It might have stayed the same in 2012/13 if rising concerns about ‘an inadequately educated workforce’ and ‘restrictive labour regulations’ had not weighed even more heavily on business.49
Vacant posts
In its 2010 report, the Public Service Commission criticised the large number of vacant posts (306 000 at that time) within the public service, urging government departments to do much more to recruit skilled employees. But by June 2012 the government was still unable to fill some 304 000 vacancies, leaving it with a vacancy rate of close on 20% (one in five posts) within the public service.50
The minister of labour, Mildred Oliphant, blamed the high vacancy rate on the limited pool of skills available in the open market, coupled with competition from the private sector. But also relevant, says Adam Habib, vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, is the fact that the performance bonuses of managers within the public service partially depend on their success in fulfilling racial targets. Commented Habib in August 2013: ‘The public service has to meet its transformation quotas and the easiest way to do this is to stop replacing white bureaucrats who have left with other whites when a black replacement cannot be found, for the percentage of black employees will then automatically increase. “You fill your quota and you get your bonus – and we end up with service delivery in a bad state”.’51
In 2010 trade union Solidarity said it planned to bring a series of court cases highlighting the negative effects of the state’s refusal to appoint qualified whites to vacant posts. Its first case involved a police captain with 24 years’ experience, Renate Barnard, who had twice been refused promotion to a more senior post despite having been identified each time as the most suitable candidate. When this happened a third time, the post was withdrawn as being ‘not critical’ to the performance of the police, but this seemed simply an expedient way to explain a third refusal to appoint her.52
In February 2010 the Labour Court ruled in Barnard’s favour. It instructed the SAPS to appoint her to the post, saying its earlier refusal to promote her amounted to racial discrimination that the police had been unable to justify. An editorial in the Sowetan applauded the court’s decision, adding: ‘It was always absurd that the SAPS would not promote a qualified woman even when it could not find a suitable black candidate for the post. It is this type of short-sightedness that has resulted in many state institutions falling apart as a result of insufficient capacity.’53
However, the SAPS appealed against this ruling to the Labour Appeal Court, which overturned it in November 2012. Handing down the appellate ruling, Judge President Dunstan Mlambo said that appointing Barnard to the post would have ‘aggravated the over-representation of whites’ at the level in issue (level 9) and ‘represented a step backwards’. In addition, the national commissioner was not obliged to fill an advertised post, and the lower court had erred in finding that the failure to appoint Barnard ‘compromised service delivery’.54
Barnard appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), which overturned Judge Mlambo’s findings in November 2013. Handing down the SCA’s ruling, Judge Mohamed Navsa, acting deputy president of the court, said Barnard had been discriminated against because ‘she was a white female’, which meant the onus lay on the police to show that this was fair. The SAPS had argued that appointing Barnard would ‘violate’ its employment equity plan, but Navsa said ‘this attitude would turn [the] numerical targets [required by the EE Act] into quotas, which are prohibited’. In addition, although the Constitution required ‘broad representivity’ in the public service, it also stressed the need for efficiency and for appointments to be based on ‘ability, objectivity, and fairness’. Overall, said Navsa, the SAPS had failed to establish that ‘the discrimination complained of was fair’, which meant the decision of the Labour Appeal Court could not stand.55
Added Navsa: ‘Dealing with race classifications, as is necessary under the Employment Equity Act, feels almost like a throwback to the grand apartheid design … [Given the country’s history], it will take a continuous and earnest commitment to forging a future that is colour blind … For now, ironically, in order to redress past imbalances with affirmative action measures, race has to be taken into account. We should do so fairly and without losing focus and reminding ourselves that the ultimate objective is to ensure a fully inclusive society.’56
The SCA judgment may help put an end to the state’s common practice of allowing key posts in the public service to remain vacant rather than filling them with qualified whites. However, the SAPS has appealed against the appeal court’s ruling to the Constitutional Court, and much now depends on how the latter court decides. In addition, the practice of blocking the appointment or promotion of white candidates is so pervasive in a host of public service departments that it may require a number of successful court challenges to bring it to an end.57
Employment equity and cadre deployment
As earlier described, employment equity in the public service has also opened the way for cadre deployment – the ANC’s policy of appointing party loyalists to key positions at all tiers of government, so as to consolidate the organisation’s control over all levers of state power.58
In 2012 a report by the Human Sciences Research Council (HRSC), a state-funded research agency, warned that ‘the ANC’s deployment strategy systematically places loyalty ahead of merit and even of competence and is therefore a serious obstacle to an efficient public service’. The report added that ‘politically connected incompetent people are often deployed to public positions, leading to a demoralised public service’. It went on: ‘Incompetent and unqualified people are unable to deliver services efficiently and effectively.