Sunday Times reports that Department of Public Service & Administration (DPSA) Minister Inkosi Mzamo Buthelezi believes that civil servants are overworked and underpaid. In an interview last week, Buthelezi rejected the notion of a bloated public service as “far from the truth”.
The more than 1.3-million public servants received a 5.5% wage increase this year, costing the fiscus an additional R23bn. At least 55,000 government officials earn more than R1m a year. However, Buthelezi believes more should be done to incentivise government workers as a counter to private sector recruitment. “As South Africans we should avoid a situation where we’ve got several challenges as a country financially and the soft targets become the public servants. We’ve got about 1.3-million public servants servicing a population of over 60-million South Africans — which on its own tells you that there is much pressure,” the minister argued. He said the characterisation of public servants as “lazy” was wrong — instead they were demoralised. “In an ideal world we would like to see public servants well paid. If they are well taken care of, that boosts the morale of employees, which ultimately results in better performance at work and improved service delivery,” Buthelezi opined.
He also defended the ANC’s controversial cadre deployment, saying it was not an “evil”— the problem was how it was being implemented. “We should not define cadre deployment from a prism of state capture and corruption; we must define it from the true meaning of the word,” he pointed out.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Sisanda Mbolekwa at Sunday Times (subscriber access only)
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