ADM allowances, salaries questioned
My wife is a senior college lecturer with over 30 years of experience, one of thousands of hardworking civil servants. Such lecturers, teachers, nurses, police officers are the ones who asked for a new chair six years ago, or a second photocopier because 50 of them need to print 30,000 pages of an exam paper by tomorrow. For these efforts they fill in pages of performance assessment forms resulting in an annual bonus so big it does not pay for a tank of petrol.
But recent DD articles report that Amathole district municipality “managers”, so-called, are paid more in their car allowance per month than she and her colleagues are paid in monthly salary. This is the municipality that is so badly run it cannot pay salaries to workers, yet it can pay car allowances, unearned bonuses and illegal increases to managers.
An advertisement in the DD on November 27 illustrates how incompetent ADM is: a three-year contract outsourcing “printing, posting, bulk SMS, bulk e-mailing, website hosting of ADM customer account statements”. They cannot even do these basic administration tasks, yet they have 200 managers.
ADM is also the parent of Aspire, a tiny so-called development agency that pays a board chair a million a year to guide fewer than 20 people, and to achieve what?
These situations demonstrate a fraction of the national problem of a civil service cost that is out of control, and that the ANC government is too petrified to discuss, let alone tackle. It used to be that civil service salaries were all lower than their private sector equivalents, but were balanced by security of tenure, pensions, and housing allowances. A department had a handful of directors close to god, there were maybe five subsidised vehicles, everyone else used a government garage vehicle, government meetings took place in government offices with no lunch provided, trips to Pretoria were a rare event, and files were guarded by fierce registry aunties. Now civil service salaries at “manager” level are higher than their private sector counterparts, the organograms are swollen with managers, sinecures and “advisers”, and the actual work is contracted out to financial and auditing consultants. Hotels laugh to the bank with no fewer than five seminars/ workshops/ commissions/ every day, usually with overnight stays, travel claims and hundreds of parked SUVs.
Enormous savings could be made without reducing anyone’s salary by cutting out subsidised vehicles, cellphone allowances and thirteenth cheques, and by awarding bonuses only for proven outstanding work. Annual reports do not need full colour or glossy paper printing by the hundreds of unread pages for distribution at “launches”. As our politicians love to tell us, you eat an elephant in small bites.
— Mike Coleman, Nahoon