Joined-up government needs to scratch all those itches
When Joe Slovo was housing minister during the Mandela presidency, he hosted his counterpart from India. The visiting Indian delegation was subjected to a number of presentations on the history of apartheid spatial planning, the backlog in housing and various policy proposals that were being considered.
On the second day of the visit one of the SA officials cheerfully asked the Indian minister his opinion of SA’s approach to housing. He said we were behaving like the person with an itch in the ear, spending time thinking about which hand to use to scratch it.
“I haven’t seen any houses being built!” he exclaimed.
Lack of implementation and service delivery are among the most consistent criticisms of the public service. At different moments we have seen the locus of implementation shifting. In the early years it was around the Reconstruction & Development Programme office, headed by Jay Naidoo, who was minister without portfolio.
“Joined-up” government became the catchword of public administration around the world, especially in Britain under Tony Blair’s premiership. Under former president Thabo Mbeki, SA had its own version in the form of ministerial and director-general clusters, which to this day process government plans or policies before they are submitted to the cabinet.
Structures such as the Government Technical Advisory Centre and Government Communications & Information System, where I had a stint in its formative years as deputy director-general, were established as agencies to provide professional advisory services across departments.
The National Development Plan released during Jacob Zuma’s presidency was to provide the coherence within which implementation was to be achieved. Once Cyril Ramaphosa took over the reins, he quickly realised the damage that years of corruption, cronyism and the sidelining of experienced and capable public
servants had wreaked on the public service.
A number of initiatives have been undertaken by Ramaphosa’s administration to get coherent responses both from the public service and broader society. Hence the setting up of various advisory councils, which have displayed a mixed bag of performances.
The “delivery unit” at the centre of government has become one of the more recent ways governments have tried to tackle logjams in implementation. Operation Vulindlela, a joint structure of the presidency and the Treasury, was created in September 2020 to work with line departments to push through urgent structural reforms, while drawing in the private sector and labour.
Vulindlela has been focused on four priorities: stabilising electricity supply; reducing the cost and increasing the quality of digital communications; ensuring sustainable water supply; and improving competitive pricing and service quality in freight transport.
Among its early initiatives is working with several government and private sector roleplayers and Eskom in raising the licensing threshold for embedded generation. As for water, it has seen to the revival of blue and green drop water quality assessments, and has also been assisting in the rollout of the e-visa system.
The unit must avoid the problems previous attempts had to deal with, such as turf wars, overreliance on external consultants and technocrats, and the sense of elected officials being undermined.
Such units bring a focus and energy for a limited period, and they must appreciate that the bureaucrats who remain are the ones who will have to continue the hard slog of implementation.
Over the years I have dined out on the story of the Indian housing minister. Friends have embellished it by suggesting that a consultant was appointed to help decide which hand to use to scratch the ear. And yet another friend, a former public servant, added that the consultants came back after much international benchmarking and feasibility studies with a 1,000-page report, concluding that the ear actually didn’t need scratching and they could offer a bespoke solution that would cost about $1,000 a month.