Governance and Administration Cluster Media Briefing

Briefing

17 Feb 2015

The Governance and Administration Cluster, chaired by the Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Malusi Gigaba, held a media briefing on the implementation of the Government Programme of Action for the post State of the Nation Address (SONA) 2015. The briefing outlined the process made by government through this Cluster and provided more details of the plans announced by the President during the SONA. Public Service and Administration Minister, Mr Collins Chabane, was also in attendance.

Minister Gigaba read out the statement.

Minutes

Questions and Answers:

Journalist: Can we get more information on the oversight visits as well as on how the Public Service Management Act would be implemented. The Public Service Commission had been saying for years now that even the highest public servants do not declare their financial interests. Last year it was found that many civil servants inaccurately declared their interests and that many senior civil servants were running businesses they did not declare. Can you talk to the structures that would be put in place to ensure that this Act would actually be implemented?

Minister Chabane: The Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) conducted oversight visits to various service delivery centres. The main purpose was to address the gaps, to listen to citizen complaints and to find mechanisms to resolve the issues. Every department tried to do their bit on their own to complement what DPME was doing. Oversight visits are mainly done to identify gaps and assist departments to work out a service delivery plan. In terms of the declarations, the system will change from manual to e-disclosure. The pilot project had been run in a number of departments and we are confident that the technical glitches will be sorted out. This new system will be able to help identify those that have not declared much faster. We will not only wait for the Public Service Commission to get this information and we think we will be able to improve on both the disclosures and the inaccurate information.

Minister Gigaba: Apart from DPME, departments also undertake their own visits, monitored by the Presidency. We have to submit reports on our interactions with the public, as well as visits to service points on a regular basis. In some instances, the President and Deputy President themselves have made visits to delivery points themselves and it heightened alertness to the fact that at any given point in time our service points might be visited by either the Presidency, Ministers or monitoring departments.

Journalist: How many senior officials are suspended at the moment and what was it costing the country in terms of wages for no work done?

Minister Chabane: The numbers of suspended officials at that time were released some time last year, but I cannot recall the exact number. There is official documentation available that will be able to provide the information. This type of information would be readily available once the database had been completed.

Journalist: How will the central system to deal with the cases of precautionary suspensions work? The National Development Plan (NDP) recommended that government appoint a ‘super director-general’ to oversee all public service director-generals. Where is that process?

Minister Chabane: The Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) is working on creating a central system where all the suspensions are reported to DPSA to see how many people were suspended, for how long, what the cost to the state was and what should be done. The proposal by DPSA, which had been accepted by Cabinet, was to identify a pool of labour and legal experts to assist departments in need of investigations or to chair panels for disciplinary hearings to fast track cases. By end of March 2015 the system will be in place. DPSA, DPME and the Presidential Office are looking at the various models of the ‘super director-general’ and once that information has been approved by Cabinet, we will be able to come back and explain what system would be adopted.

Journalist: Ideally, how long should it take from the point of suspension to a finalised case?

Minister Chabane: Regulations provided the times frames, but the suspension period should not exceed six months and then some sort of action should be taken. This time frame should be met in uncomplicated cases. Cases can be complicated by long disciplinary processes.

Minister Gigaba: The idea of what the timeframe for suspensions should be and the practical realities did not always go hand in hand. There might be multiple appeals that prolonged the cases. We are not only looking at what to do when a person has committed an alleged transgression, we are also looking at proactive measures to deal with ethics and integrity in public service to preclude instances of suspension. We are trying to do all that we can in terms of declarations and ethical conduct in public service. We train, develop and empower officials more to reduce the transgressions. In many instances actions can only be taken after all the appeals had been concluded.

Journalist: Would the Act apply retrospectively?

Minister Chabane: It would be very rare for a law to be applied retrospectively and it would not be legally advisable. This law would be applied and implemented from the date as indicated by the President.

Journalist: What was the timeframe in which everybody would be receiving their Smart ID Cards? In terms of the Presidential Hotline surveys, what was the reach of the Hotline in the rural areas?

Minister Gigaba: We hope to achieve the objective of converting all bar-coded green ID’s to Smart ID cards by 2018. It depended on the expansion of our footprint beyond the 403 offices of DHA and the availability of uninterrupted network supply. The application for the Smart ID card takes place using the live capture system which depends heavily on network supplied by some of our service providers. I have heard from a lot of people on social networking sites that there are some very serious problems at DHA offices with the availability of reliable network supply and this resulted in ‘downtime’ challenges. We are working around the clock to address these challenges and the service providers have been notified that uninterrupted network supply was needed to deliver services. At the present moment, 140 offices have been converted into dedicated Smart card offices with the aim to expand that footprint with 38 more offices in the next financial year.

Minister Chabane: The Hotline has been running for quite some time – since 2009/10. Many South Africans used the Hotline and they called from various parts of the country, both urban and rural areas.

Journalist: Can you give us more details on the project that talked to Smart ID cards being available at banks and whether there was a budget for this?

Minister Gigaba: There are several new innovations that are going to be implemented by DHA in the course of this and the next financial year to assist South Africans to apply for Smart ID cards and passports in a convenient way. That was why the President announced that we would soon be able to apply for our Smart ID cards at our personal banks. The bank would be able to take the applications for the Smart ID cards through linked systems with DHA. A person will be able to collect their Smart ID card at the bank, because the logic was that you should be able to collect your card at the office the application was made. In April 2015 the pilot process will start with the relevant banks which were Standards Bank, First National Bank and Nedbank. We are hoping that with the passage of time we would be able to enlist the services of the South African Post Office as well, because it had the largest footprint and the furthest reach in the country, especially into rural areas. Around April we will make further and more concrete announcements around how the pilots are going to work. These projects would lessen the pressure at DHA offices and increase our ability to utilise the infrastructure of the private sector as partners in delivering government services. Once the pilot is successful, we can then open up the application for Smart ID cards to all South Africans.

Minister Chabane: The President, during the SONA identified the districts where broadband will be rolled out as pilots and also identified Telkom as the lead agent in the rollout. It will assist a lot in making sure that services are available in communities in far-flung areas once we have the necessary countrywide connectivity.

Journalist: Could you give us an update on the review of the Ministerial Handbook?

Minister Chabane: This process has been ongoing for a very long time. I think we are left with two or three steps towards the conclusion of the matter. It involves quite a number of stakeholders (police, transport, public works and the commission on remuneration of public office bearers) and we are now consolidating the report which will be tabled in Cabinet. We should be able to complete it before the end of March and an announcement will be made in that regard.

Journalist: Given the delays that are happening in the disciplinary process due to the multiple appeals it seems that officials are hiding behind the Public Service Act and the labour laws. Was there a case to be made for changing the legislation?

Minister Gigaba: There are no plans yet to change the labour laws or the Public Service Act to deal with the problem of transgressions of public servants and the prolonging of the disciplinary process. As a rules-based system, people have the right of appeal right up to the point of satisfaction. We want to find a way thorough engagement with the pool of labour experts to expedite the resolution of the disciplinary cases so that even if people appeal, it does not become a source of prolonging the suspension. It was being dealt with two ways by dealing with the integrity and ethical conduct of public servants as well as expediting the disciplinary process.

Minister Chabane: South Africa is a constitutional democracy which is based on the rule of law. The processes set in place; the laws and the regulations were negotiated by various stakeholders and needed to be respected. Some of these laws were tedious and frustrating, but these processes must be understood in the lawful context. The system is democratic and the problem was getting managers to manage their areas of work.

Journalist: in terms of the review of emigration procedures, given the comments by Tourism Minister, Minister Derek Hanekom, that there has been an impact on inbound tourism numbers particularly from China and the US, are you going to review the regulations? If so, how long would that take and what are you looking at? With reference to Minister Chabane’s most recent comment regarding the problem in terms of managing the disciplinary problems lying with management capacity and not with the law and procedures. When Minister Sisulu was the minister, she spoke at length about the need for leadership development in the public administration. She talked about turning PALAMA (Public Administration Leadership and Management Academy) into something different. What is happening with PALAMA; is it still expected to develop civil servants in the way that she was articulating? Where are we in terms of developing management leadership for civil service?

Minister Gigaba:  we have indicated that the immigration regulations are not cast in stone. In the instance that there is something, new compelling facts that come up, we will review them. There is one thing we will not do. We will not relax the requirements for any person coming to South Africa to apply in person, they have to, we do the same when we are travelling to their countries. Secondly, we have clarified a number of things which particularly affect tourists for example the requirement that if they are coming into the country they should be in possession of an unabridged birth certificate for their children. We have indicated that it is a birth certificate as offered in their country, not as we offer it in South Africa. So, if for an example the Indian nationals are travelling to South Africa with their children. The child passport of India contains the details of the parents of the child and we have said we would accept that. Other countries who offer other forms of documents, we also indicated that we would accept that. One of the challenges with regards to China has been the fact that, because the Visa Facilitation Centres enables us to reach out to many points beyond the cities or provinces where you have South African consulates, that therefore means that you have the capability to reach out to far flung areas in any country. We are able, therefore, to service even those people without having to review the immigration regulations. I think the challenge has been, in some of the countries, you cannot offer consulate services where there are no diplomatic offices of the country. But where countries would agree, we would be able to offer those services utilising Visa Facilitation Centres, we would establish Visa Facilitation Centres in those areas and offer the consular services of home affairs as we require. I think what we need is more robust discussions with the relevant countries, particularly India and China who are sending us more tourists -  for us to be able to provide them with the services that they require without us having to relax the requirement that a person must apply in person. In reality, we understand the views of the different parties, but as home affairs we have to do a balancing act between economic development and security. We have made this point several times that, we wouldn’t want any surprise, but there have been instances where our immigration regulations have been breached, transgressed and compromised. We need to have a balance between economic development and national security in how we deal with them. In that regard, we have to take into consideration the fact that tourists will stop coming to South Africa if a security mishap happened, and we must not be caught sleeping. We need to ensure we balance in a manner that guarantee tourists coming to South Africa that it is a safe endeavour and they should continue coming. We established a joint task team with the industry (aviation, airlines, tourism, and hospitality) last year to look at a number of things that they would want assistance on and would want to exchange ideas and communication on. One of the things we indicated is that we welcome from them any new ideas about what we could do, and there are going to be additional proposals we are going to make that would make it extremely convenient for tourists to come to South Africa. We are continuously working on improving systems and ensuring that we can provide a service that addresses the concerns of the industry. But we cannot alleviate the concerns of the industry above the concerns of the security sector. The recent experiences in Kenya, Nigeria and our neighbours do indicate that South Africa must be on the alert; we cannot be naïve to the facts that some of the unwanted elements on the continent – the white widow, the Rwandan man strangled in Sandton – all those instances happened because our immigration regulations were relaxed. It may not make sense for someone to travel via your country to commit a crime of mass murder else, it might not make sense for someone to your country to committee a crime of murder against a national of their country. But what if they commit a crime of mass murder, what would be say? We would blame immigration regulations, we would blame the Department of Home Affairs, and we need to be on the alert. There are many people who travel with bad intentions, we need to balance that. We know it causes inconvenience for the ordinary traveler, but it causes inconvenience for me travelling to the US to having to take my shoes, jacket and belt in order to get into that country because some thug somewhere decided they must put an end to my free movement. South Africa must not be caught napping in this regard, we need to do that balancing act, in a manner that ensures we do not compromise security but at the same time we continue to be welcoming to immigrants. But as I said immigration regulations are not cast in stone and we will continuously review them, and if new facts and realities arise, and if new conditions emerge we will amend them. And if better systems emerge on our part, we will introduce those systems to make it even more convenient for tourists to come into the country. 

Minister Chabane: on the training of public servants we said we are transforming PALAMA into the National School of Government, we are in that process. It was launched in October 2013, now we are busy putting in systems and reviewing the curriculum and the courses. That is in course, we think we should be able to add value to training requirements for people employed in the public service. But that does not remove the fact that, managers with or without that training they have to do their work as they are employed to do it. Managers will have to manage; especially when it relates to the day to day running of the department, unit or centres.

Journalist: why has ABSA not signed on as a service provider? Can you talk on the relaxation of visa regulations for SA business travellers to the UK?

Minister Gigaba:  there are no relaxations for South Africans travelling to the UK. What the UK announced last year is that they are relaxing the requirements for a transit visa for those travelling to the US or Australia, and we said “sorry but we are not excited”. What we want is a complete visa exemption for all South Africans travelling to the UK, and that is why in response we then decided to impose a visa requirement for the holders of UK official and diplomatic passports. We left the ordinary UK passport holders with the exemption which they had. It was not something to be excited about, because it did not address the issue we have been raising with the British government.

The ABSA bank would still come to the party, I hope, what I had mentioned were the banks that had by now signed the MOUs with us. The Director General (DG) has thus far signed the MOUs with FNB and Standard Bank, Nedbank has indicated their willingness. The DG was abroad in Côte d'Ivoire at the Civil Registration Conference, he would probably sign that MOU with Nedbank soon – we still await ABSA bank to indicate whether they are coming to the party or not. We are discussing with the South African Post Office the possibility of also utilising their infrastructure and footprint for the same purposes.

The briefing was adjourned.