Victims of poor service will have to fix it

We were never promised, nor should we realistically have expected, a public sector that performs as well as it seems to do in, say, Scandinavia.

But what we have in SA is widely recognised as an almost complete failure.

The government offers little defence of its current practice, just endless promises of reform. But why does the SA public sector perform quite so badly?

One feature of the public sector in SA deserves attention. The financial rewards it offers its officials salaries, medical and pension benefits and secure tenure are extremely attractive compared with those in the private sector, leaving little incentive for movement from public to private employment.

The government’s regret is that the limited flow of taxes has provided minimal scope to increase the number of teachers, nurses and even humble pothole fillers.

Those who have jobs are given more reward in the form of regular above-inflation increases in their salaries, while hospital wards and classrooms become increasingly crowded, the roads impassable and the lights off as much as on.

Given the superiority of public employment and the abject failure of the formal economy and labour market to absorb more people of working age, the issue of how favoured jobs in the public sector are allocated becomes especially important.

Recruiting on merit is clearly not the overriding consideration in SA. Observing racially prescribed quotas is one of the binding constraints and a key performance indicator by which institutions and their leaders are measured.

ANC cadre employment is another important objective of government employment policy. Notwithstanding the implications drawn by the Zondo state capture commission it is a practice that has not been disavowed by the president. However, should cadre deployment not be the overriding mission of government human resources specialists, the tempting gap between supply and demand for highly prized state jobs would probably be filled by unorthodox procedures in exchange for a “finder’s fee” or the equivalent.

The opportunity to capture some of the continuous rents will not have escaped those with bargaining power or influence. Historically, in other regimes, shop stewards backed by unions with the power to cripple essential services have exercised such powers when allocating limited and well-paid jobs, as on the docks or on construction sites. Nature, including homo economicus, abhors a vacuum.

If employment in the public sector is not explained by objective measures of ability to perform important functions by qualifications carefully vetted and psychometric measures of potential objectively administered and when advancement is based upon years of service and not key performance indicators of the kind common in the private sector, how are the officials so appointed likely to behave, all the way up the hierarchy?

As may be presumed of all in the workplace, they will behave mostly in a self-interested way. You really do get what you pay for.

Absent any link between merit, performance and reward, the acceptance of the grave responsibility for carefully spending hard-earned taxes, or of being a conscientious public servant for its own reward, is far less likely to be the outcome.

Denying the capture of highly valuable contracts with the government, opening the tender honestly, and whistleblowing when procurement rules are flaunted, become essentially quixotic actions, even dangerous ones.

Going the extra mile when nursing or teaching or policing all becomes far less likely. After all, where else is the citizen to go for a permit or essential documentation, or the poor to go for schooling or medical care or protection?

They are easily treated as supplicants rather than valuable customers. Producers’, rather than consumers’, interests will prevail.

The case for meritorious public service is essential to the purpose of good government. Introducing far more of it in SA will, however, have to overcome powerful interests in the established favour- and crony-driven system. It will take the recognition, resentments and ultimately the votes of the victims of poor service to do so.