Johannesburg - Trevor Manuel’s National Planning Commission (NPC) has ruthlessly exposed problems in the public service in its “diagnostic” report reflecting the commission’s first two years of work.
The NPC’s report also contains the first frank criticism of affirmative action in the public service.
The report is also scathing about outcomes-based education and about South Africa’s high minimum wages and low level of productivity.
Too few people in South Africa are working, and those with jobs are doing too little for the money they get paid.
These are among the main conclusions arrived at in the probing analysis by Manuel and his team of commissioners in the NPC of the state of the South African economy and why jobs are not being created.
Among the difficult decisions that South Africa will have to take is to tone down managers and workers’ salary increases, according to a diagnostic report on the economy.
Compared with other countries, the starting salaries of South African workers are far too high in relation to productivity. Where a new worker in developed countries earns about 37% of the salary average, a South African novice earns 60% of the average. This discourages companies from taking on new young workers.
In many manufacturing industries productivity declined between 2001 and last year. The average hourly factory wage in South Africa is five times that in Sri Lanka, China, India and the Philippines. It's three times that in Mexico and Malaysia, and also higher than that in Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Hungary.
Further, collective bargaining is to the advantage of bigger employers and undermines the competitiveness of smaller firms.
Continual change is advanced as the main reason for the public service’s incapacity.
The transformation of the public service has not been completed, yet continual change is extremely destabilising.
Some departments, such as the police service, are always in a state of change. Time is usually not given to test the effectiveness of change before new changes are introduced.
The most radical change to public policy that we can introduce is to avoid the endless stream of new initiatives and rather focus relentlessly on working methods to reduce the gap between policy and practice, says the report.
The NPC is scathing about outcomes-based education. The country’s education problems arise not from a lack of money, but from defective institutional structures.
Nevertheless, outcomes-based education – which would challenge even the world’s best education systems – was introduced in 1998, the NPC points out.
It says that some or other from of affirmative action was required after 2004 to make the public service more representative of the country in terms of race.
The difference between salary levels in the public service and those of ordinary members of the public however means that a public service increasingly representative in terms of race is still distanced from the greater portion of the population. It's a challenge that has to be considered carefully, the report goes on.
Affirmative action demands thorough processes for selection, mentorship and career development. When these are not in place, affirmative action reduces incentives to work hard and improve service levels.
This affects everyone negatively, but the consequences are worst for the poor black population that is the most dependent on public services, says the report.
