Delivery by the state requires a clear focus
DIANA Farrell, the former head of the McKinsey Global Institute, once remarked: “Rarely has the need for effective government been greater than now — and rarely has the ability to produce it been more constrained.” Yet the purpose of government is to improve the quality of life of the citizens, especially in providing basic services, security, health and education, and improving the quality of infrastructure and business climate.
In an article that appeared in the McKinsey Quarterly of October 2012, titled Delivery Challenges of Government, the authors pointed out that “even in the best of times, delivery is hard for governments”. Recently I have been reflecting on governance and public leadership, in particular why implementation of the government’s policies and strategies proves stubborn. It is tempting to see failure in governance as a uniquely South African problem, even though I think our government has, on several occasions, developed a habit of shooting itself in the foot.
Two weeks ago, I was invited to give a talk at the Allan Gray Centre for Values-based Leadership. The theme was governance and public policy. My years of experience in government, including leading a policy initiative, did not prepare me sufficiently for the questions that followed. The key question was whether the government can be fixed at all, and what would it take to do so.
Offering some context, I reminded the participants that the government has had to redesign a public service that was plagued by inefficiencies and pervasive corruption. Before 1994, the public service was balkanised among 11 entities, including homeland authorities in former homelands, and separate administrations for coloureds and Indians. Resource distribution was skewed to minister to white entitlements in respect of economic opportunities, education, health, and safety. Reforming this is no mean feat.
Still, efforts to transform government in two decades of democracy have fallen short of expectations. Those who can afford it — black and white — opt out of critical aspects of government services such as healthcare, security and schooling, and pay a premium for private sector services.
Increasingly, this trend is extending to citizenship: there is a growing inclination among South Africans to buy property abroad to secure a second citizenship as an insurance against government failure. This is not peculiar to upwardly mobile South Africans. Wealthy Russians, Chinese, Japanese and Middle Easterners like to gobble up properties in the West. However, when the primary objective is not investment but to obtain a second citizenship, it is a sign of a lack of confidence in one’s government.
The question posed after my talk, on whether the government can be fixed, is not easy to answer. In his book, How to Run a Government, Michael Barber comes close to answering it. Drawing on his years of experience in establishing the Delivery Unit under then British prime minister Tony Blair, he proposes intense focus on developing clear priorities, tight measurements and timeous implementation. He then maps out critical steps towards delivery across various functions of government. This notion of delivery units has been implemented in other countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
While, in some cases, the problems confronting governments are as a result of poor planning and weak organisation, in other contexts they are a product of politics and ideology. SA falls in the latter.
The National Development Plan sets out a bold narrative on how to overcome socioeconomic challenges and paints an elaborate picture of how success would look, but there are no signs of genuine commitment to implementation. Some have, cynically, come to characterise the plan as a no-delivery programme. Success requires big actions. Insulating the public service from narrow politics should be primary.
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Qobo is a political economist.