State capacity should be ‘number one investment’, says PSC chair Somadoda Fikeni

Professionalising the public service may not accord with our “noisy, argumentative and sometimes headline-obsessed and temperamental democracy” but it remains crucial for all South Africans, says chairperson of the Public Service Commission (PSC) Somadoda Fikeni.

Addressing the Kgalema Motlanthe’s Dialogue Among Equals in the Drakensberg on Sunday, Fikeni said state capacity undergirds overall economic performance.

“You can talk about energy until your face is blue, you can talk about Transnet Freight and Rail but if you do not have professional capacity, you can talk about crime or anything but ... state capacity should be the number one investment,” said Fikeni.

He decried how government used austerity bluntly when it reduces budgets. He said the mandate for the PSC was expanded to include municipalities, state-owned enterprises and employees of parliament yet the budget was not commensurate with the overall goal.

He added that much work still needed to be done to help politicians come to grips with the complexity of state administration and oversight. He said the PSC had received an appeal for help from a municipality where 15% of the ward councillors could neither read nor write. “Can we professionalise the public service ... without professionalising politics? Now those (councillors) have an oversight over a water engineering programme, a civil engineering programme. They can tell an engineer with a PhD that we are in charge,” he said.

It was for that reason, he added, that they supported public service and administration minister Mzamo Buthelezi “in saying this far and not any further when some ministers wanted to bring in matriculants as key holders of positions in their private offices. This becomes a slippery slope — you make an exception here, those people around the minister are very powerful. They’re the ones who are gatekeepers when you want to see the minister. They whisper all kinds of things in the ears of the ministers and after some time, they could easily hypnotise the ministers in the wrong direction because sometimes they will hallucinate facts they do not understand.”

Fikeni appealed for state capacity and its professionalisation to be discussed at the upcoming National Dialogue. “If you don’t talk about state capacity, everything else you agree on in that National Dialogue you must forget about it because the public sector is the engine of any state. You can have the best driver but if the engine is dead, you’re going nowhere,” he said, noting professionalisation must be supported especially by the media even though it’s not a dramatic topic.

ANC NEC member David Makhura noted there is no room for ignorance among leaders in a changing world. Makhura said leaders should read and know more.