Officials blasted for doing everything but their jobs

“JUST do your jobs.” That is the call from political analyst Ebrahim Fakir‚ who chastised public representatives yesterday for doing everything else but their jobs.

Fakir‚ speaking at an SA Local Government Association (Salga) conference on how to deepen democratic participation, said public representatives‚ politicians and government officials appeared to have too much time on their hands.

He said the number of politicians taking up university courses when there was such a high service-delivery backlog begged the question: “Where do they find the time?”

He argued that officials needed to possess the skills to do the jobs for which they were employed anyway.

“Far too many local politicians are doing many other things than what they should be doing,” he said.

“The answer to all these challenges is simply: ‘Do your jobs.’”

Political analyst Dr Somadoda Fikeni‚ speaking at the same conference‚ said the government and its officials were guilty of prioritising favourable audit outcomes over actual performance and service delivery.

Fikeni said an advance towards clean audits was being achieved increasingly at the expense of government performance.

He argued that the nature of punitive measures against officials was such that performance was taking a back seat to clean audits‚ when there should be a balance between the two.

The situation was exacerbated by departments growing increasingly nonchalant about returning large sums of money to the national Treasury while trumpeting their audit achievements.

“We’ve started confusing conformity and compliance with performance.

“You’ll hear certain politicians and departments bragging that they got a clean audit, but no taps were delivered,” he said.

Fikeni’s criticism comes as Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula yesterday lauded officials in his department for their third consecutive clean audit award. – TMG Digital