REMARKS BY PREMIER
Programme Director Mr. Dube
Advocate Selby Baqwa
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen,
We have gathered in this hall to officially launch the Nelspruit offices of the Public Protector.
This is yet another giant step in the province aimed at ensuring the protection of our people from arbitrary neglect of duty by those who are supposed to serve them. I believe I have been invited to make a few remarks here as head of the Mpumalanga Provincial Government.
Allow me therefore to speak in that capacity and share with you experiences about what I know and do. A few weeks ago I emphasised to public service managers in the Lowveld that we needed to rid our public service of mannerism or tendencies that only serve to destroy the capacity and legitimacy of our public service.
“Our Business is Service”. We have a duty and mandate to serve our people.
We must put the people first in line with the Batho-Pele ethos.
You see, the bureaucracy, which was inherited from the apartheid regime, was unrepresentative and racist in character and as a result was both unwilling and incapable of providing all South Africans the service excellence they all deserve. It was a bureaucracy put in place to ensure the continued survival of apartheid racist tendencies.
Linked to this historical reality is the issue of style and management philosophy in the public service. I asked all of them to display, through their work, that we are a new public service committed to serving all the citizens of this country in the most effective and efficient manner.
Our excellence as the public service entails a new philosophy of dealing with those who consume our products - the citizens of this country.
Many public servants are devoted to public service. But many of our national and provincial departments are still operating with pre-1994 systems and procedures, which were not designed to put the needs of the people - all the citizens of South Africa - first.
Batho Pele is centered on Consultation; Service Standards; Access; Courtesy; Information; Openness and transparency; Redress, and Value for Money.
There are all these questions about whether there is any money to implement Batho Pele. Batho Pele is not about additional resources.
Many improvements that the public would like to see cost nothing - courtesy; respect, adequate information, an apology if things go wrong - these are not a matter of additional resources; they are a matter of adopting different standards of behaviour.
But then it is also about ensuring that the resources we already consume in running the Public Service are in future geared towards service delivery. It is about eliminating wasteful and expensive internal procedures and using the money we save to provide better services to more people.
It is about making sure that our priorities for where money should be spent are in line with what the public regards as priorities. Public Servants need to go that extra mile.
When at work we cannot leave people standing in queues while chatting on the phone about last night's game between Orlando Pirates and Sundowns.
We need, as public servants, to observe working hours. We need to observe starting times and knock-off time.
I am reminded of three young boys bragging of how great their fathers are. The first one says: "Well, my father runs the fastest. He can fire an arrow, and start to run, I tell you, he gets there before the arrow".
The second one says: "Ha! You think that's fast! My father is a hunter. He can shoot his gun and be there before the bullet". The third one listens to the other two and shakes his head.
He then says: "You two know nothing about fast. My father works for the Mpumalanga government. He stops working at quarter-past-four and he is home by quarter-to-three”.
Thank You.