New ministers’ plans are on the table and up for discussion {writer: Staff reporter}

Two ministers in the Presidency, who were punted as key appointments in the Cabinet of President Jacob Zuma, but whose exact mandate remained a mystery the past four months, have finally revealed their cards to show how they will form a strategic part of governing South Africa effectively and improving service delivery.

On 4 September, National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel and Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation Minister Collins Chabane, together unveiled their plans by releasing Green Papers on the strategic, policy and functional positions of their new departments.

Now is also the time for private sector formations to use the channels at their disposal to communicate their own ideas on future planning to the government.

While there has so far been a strong tendency in the Zuma government to centralise power, Manuel has taken a bold stand against too much centralised decision-making, citing both former Chinese and Soviet Union command economic planning experiments as major failures.

The unveiling of their plans – although still to be subjected to a lengthy, even tedious policy process before they may culminate in legislation and actual implementation – could not have come a moment too soon, as popular dissent over failed service delivery in many corners of the country continues to rise, triggering public protests, violence and destruction of property.

However, Manuel has cautioned that his Green Paper is essentially a discussion document and only after further extensive deliberations and finally adoption by Cabinet, will his ministry begin setting up the high-level planning structures envisaged in the document.

At this stage, he says, it does not deal with substantive issues of content.

But the structures envisaged are expected to group together a wide range of experts and leaders both inside and outside the government, who will identify obstacles to policy implementation. They will develop frameworks guiding regional planning, infrastructure investment and allocation of resources.

Manuel says the development of a national plan will require broader consultation across civil society, and that existing forums will be used for this.

“The rationale for planning is that government (and, indeed, the nation at large) requires a longer term perspective to enhance policy coherence and to help guide shorter term policy trade-offs,” he says.

“The development of a long-term plan for the country will help government departments and entities across all the spheres of government to develop programmes and operational plans to meet society’s broader developmental objectives. Such a plan must articulate the type of society we seek to create and outline the path towards a more inclusive society where the fruits of development benefit all South Africans, particularly the poor.”

Essentially, the Green Paper sets out the following structural vision for national planning:

• A National Planning Commission (NPC), comprising about 20 external commissioners not working for the government, will be influential leaders and experts in various fields. They will be appointed by President Zuma and Manuel, with the latter chairing the NPC and functioning as link between it and the government;

• A Ministerial Committee on Planning (MCP), which will provide collective planning input, will guide the planning function and will be appointed by President Zuma. He and Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe will be ex officio members, while Manuel will again chair it. Manuel will feed the work of the NPC into the government through the MPC; and

• A Secretariat to the Commission (SC) will provide research and support for the NPC and will align planning capacity across the government to ensure common methodologies, projects and data systems. It will liaise with departments, provinces, municipalities and state-owned entities.

According to Manuel and the Green Paper, there are four key outputs of the planning function.

Firstly, to develop a long-term vision for South Africa, Vision 2025, which would articulate the national aspirations regarding the society that South Africans desire and which would help with addressing key challenges and trade-offs required to achieve those goals.

The NPC would play a key role in developing such a national plan, which would have to be adopted by Cabinet for it to have the force of a government plan.

Drawing on the electoral mandate given to the government, the next set of outputs would cover the five-yearly Medium-Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) and the National Programme of Action and would be documents of national government, adopted by Cabinet.

The Minister and the MCP would co-ordinate the development of these documents with input from ministers, departments, provinces, organised local government, public entities and co-ordinating clusters.

Manuel intends commissioning further research towards discussion documents on a wide range of issues that must inform national planning, such as demographic trends, global climate change, human resource development, future energy mix and food security.

The Presidency would also release and process baseline data on critical issues such as demographics, biodiversity as well as migratory and economic trends.

Manuel furthermore says one of the functions of national planning is to develop frameworks for spatial planning, which seek to undo the damage caused by apartheid’s spatial development patterns.

This includes the development of high-level frameworks to guide regional planning and infrastructure investment.

The national planning function will provide guidance on the allocation of resources and in the development of departmental, sectoral, provincial and municipal plans.

Manuel says these two discussion documents “must be seen in the context of wider efforts led by the president to improve the performance of government through enhancing coherence and co-ordination in government, managing the performance of the state and communicating better with the public”.

Meanwhile Minister Chabane, in unveiling his ministry’s policy document/Green Paper, said the paper describes a process that ensures that the government translates its mandate into “a very clear set of outcomes and a few crucial output measures that will help us deliver on
our commitment”.  

Chabane notes that the paper has been put together after long and elaborate discussions and consultation to come up with agreed outcomes and an approach to measure performance.

“Since the establishment of the ministry, many questions have been asked about our mandate and the capacity of government to monitor its own performance. Today we outline in our paper titled, Improving Government Performance our approach and the process we will follow in delivering on our mandate,” he said.

Chabane also frankly admitted that the money directed by the government for service delivery since 1994, had not always resulted in better services and that these had often been below standard.

“We need to understand and accept why we have too often not met our objectives in delivering quality services.

The reasons vary from, among others, [a] lack of political will, inadequate leadership, management weaknesses, inappropriate institutional design and misaligned decision rights. The absence of a strong performance culture with effective rewards and sanctions has also played a part,” Chabane stated.

The ministry has identified education, health, safety, economic growth, the creation of decent jobs and rural developments as its focus areas – in line with its April election manifesto.

A minister, groups of ministers, or clusters of ministers and members of executive councils (MECs) would receive a letter from the president, which would outline the outcomes and the measures that the ministry would use to assess the performance of these persons.

A focused meeting between the president and the sector political leadership would take place every six months to assess the progress made.

Minister Chabane emphasised that the ministry’s role would not be to persecute ministers or MECs who may not be performing as well as they should be in their tasks, but rather to reform the way in which the government delivers on
its services.