BL Premium reports that laziness and inefficiency in the public service have reached such epic proportions that the problem is expected to be the focal point of March’s public service summit.

According to sources in the government, the situation is so bad President Cyril Ramaphosa has urgently tasked ministers in his executive to deal with productivity in the state. Public service minister Ayanda Dlodlo and deputy finance minister David Masondo have confirmed the matter will come into sharp focus at the summit, which will involve organised labour as well. A social contract on how to get SA working is expected to be forged at the summit. Dlodlo said performance management of public servants was now a priority. “If we generalise, we run the risk of losing complete confidence in a system that can work. What we need to look at is a performance management system and that can be achieved in the short term,” Dlodlo said. The failure of managers to fill vacancies, the abuse of sick leave and the absence of information technology systems “that talk to each other” were said to be factors too. “The issue of systems is what I am talking about when dealing with capacity of the state. Eighteen months, that is the projected timeline to fix all of that,” Dlodlo stated. Masondo concurred, saying the productivity of public servants was a “serious” issue. “What we need to measure is the performance of one home affairs office compared to another, for example, why the revenue service is able to perform optimally and other departments are not. That is an urgent task for government,” Masondo said.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Hajra Omarjee at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)

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