RISING COST OF INEFFICIENCY

A new project aimed at improving public service delivery is being embarked upon by the Prime Minister’s Office.
It is called the Improving Public Sector Performance Project and is to be funded by the World Bank.

Selected ministries, departments and agencies will be targeted to undertake a number of activities ‘to respond to the government goal of strengthening and improving efficiency in the public service’.

Professionals in various fields are being invited to apply for vacancies to undertake this exercise which will cover government’s wide performance management, strengthening public financial management, procurement and public enterprise management as well as improving statistical capacity and data quality.

The areas identified speak directly to the current challenges in the public sector but we have to question the need for such an exercise for a government that has a phobia for heeding good advice or implementing recommendations from anyone but their own.

Past experiences have taught us to be sceptical of any plans to improve service delivery and we have plenty of examples to refer to.
The best example of them all is on expenditure. Government has for years been advised to reduce expenditure and given plenty of good examples on how to do it, but this has fallen on deaf ears.

We don’t need to go too far back. Just this week a government parastatal that was set up to improve transparency and efficiencies in procurement, the Swaziland Public Procurement Agency (SPPRA) reported that 86 per cent of the parastatals and ministries are in breach of the Public Procurement Act by failing to publicise all tenders and nothing has been done about it.

This is the fourth year since the law came into effect. The institutions cannot complain of lack of cash either because it is free-of-charge to upload all tenders on the SPPRA website as required by law. So how will the new performance project address this because all these law breakers are headed by ministers who need to account to the public?

Government has also refused to fix the problem of staff management, so how can it be efficient? Those employed to supervise service delivery have no control over their subordinates. Processes to discipline staff take centuries resulting in a reluctance to act on wayward or lazy staff. And this starts at the top. There is nobody pushing ministers to deliver.

The prime minister has literally dumped the ministry performance appraisals carried out by the Public Policy Coordinating Unit (PPCU) This is another body that was tasked with improving service delivery by calling ministries to account for their targets every quarter and advising government on policy.

We also have a Management Services Board (MSB) which essentially facilitates the identification of the posts needed for a particular department or ministry in order to improve the delivery of the service offered to the public. The correct posts are availed but wrong people placed in them.
This speaks to the need to seriously look into the efficiencies of the Civil Service Commission (CSC) which is entrusted with hiring the right people for the jobs. If not, the whole project is as good as useless.

The duplication of roles between ministries that could be merged to reduce the size of the civil service is also an area that has to be addressed. The bureaucratic layers are seriously hampering efficiency in the public sector and we cannot be said to have improved service delivery without concrete recommendations here.

Most importantly, service delivery is also about having a Cabinet that will act above self interests. This could help avoid having a Finance minister deliver a budget that does not speak to national priorities. For each day that the Finance minister is called upon to justify his security budget, the criticism is a measure of just how distanced he is from reality.

Reports suggest that participants laughed at him when he told a post budget seminar on Wednesday that the 2017-18 budget he presented to Parliament was a ‘people’s budget’. These were no ‘ordinary’ people. They formed part of the country’s intellectuals from various sectors.
He should ask himself why he has no support from the business sector when it comes to job creation.

The Federation of Swaziland Employers and Chamber of Commerce (FSE&CC) would have praised him for job creation initiatives, not question where and how this budget sought to create jobs....real jobs.

The minister also had difficulty justifying why the country was spending more on security and less on agriculture, yet the job creation, economic growth and food security benefits from agriculture far outweighed the increased wage bill of an idle security in a peaceful country.

So if there is any place to start for the improved performance and efficiency project, it has to be right in Cabinet. Otherwise we simply have yet another exercise in futility at a huge cost to the taxpayer.

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