South Africa

I touched on this subject a bit in a previous post (Capacity at Municipalites) but I'd like to flesh-out my thoughts more on the subject. The outbreak of demonstrations and protests concerning lax service delivery is just one of the many problems caused by the capacity crises in local government. A functioning and effective civil service (sorry do those last three words constitute an oxymoron?) is extremely important, especially when the government has made such lofty promises about service delivery.

 

A close friend of mine works in a job that requires constant liasing with local governement officials (LGO's). He says his job is made all the more difficult and complicated because he finds he has to often shepherd local LGO's through simple compliance procedures that are required under municipal law. This means he basically does part of their jobs for them. He says things are getting worse every year and the morale of the people he deals with is extremely low. This has the effect of a) cutting into my friends productivity as he babysits the LGO's b) leads to much frustration and stress for all involved and c) a situation where both sides begin to resent each other and find it difficult to work in a professional manner. Not quite the recipe for effective local government co-operation.

 

What are the reasons behind this disaster? In my opinion much of the blame must lie with the governments ill-advised hiring and retrenchment policies in the late 90's. The large number of skilled managers that left the service only to be replaced by inexperienced  juniors was a major mistake on the part of the government. Yes it was necessary to have reform and yes it was (and is) necessary to try create a demographically representative civil service, however the governments slash and burn policy towards senior managers just because they worked for the previous regime was ill informed and short sighted.

 

While I agreed with the Prez. in terms of the capacity problem, I do not agree with his solutions which again looks short-sighted and knee-jerk. Do we really need to import new municipal managers? If so I would have three questions :

 

a) Where from?

b) Why can't we find suitable candidated domestically?     

c) Will these new candidates satisfy the Employment Equity Act?

 

Honestly I do wonder whether the Prez has some sour grapes, because I'm 90% sure people with the needed skills can be found in SA. Unfortunately for the Prez most of them are over 50 and white - come on Thabo, just eat humble pie and let them back on board for awhile, at least until they can teach an EFFECTIVE group of managers to take over.