Turning around Home Affairs

The move, writes E-Brief News, comes as government departments continue to draw criticism. In the latest attack, the DA has released a damning report which notes that corruption and other problems are stopping even basic services being delivered.

Corrupt officials in the Department of Home Affairs will no longer be able to get away with their actions after the unveiling this week of a new system that will ensure employees are being watched and monitored every step of the way. The department has introduced a new ‘track-and-trace’ system to help fight corruption and speed up delivery of identity documents. Announcing the new system, Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said it would allow the department to ‘know who has done what every step of the way, whether they have acted efficiently and properly, or whether there has been negligence or corruption in the process’. Besides encouraging a culture of individual responsibility for assigned tasks, the track-and-trace system would allow managers to monitor the individual productivity of officials in the business unit responsible for issuing ID documents, says a report on the Mail & Guardian Online site. Managers would be able to assess how many documents were processed daily by individual officials, and hold them to department-wide standards and norms, thus increasing efficiency across the board and, ultimately, cutting the time taken to issue documents. The system would also allow Home Affairs to make a significant impact on the fraudulent issuing of ID documents, Mapisa-Nqakula said. By clearly identifying each official responsible for every step of the process, it would allow managers to find any departmental employee who substituted photographs and sold IDs illegally, altered details on the central registry system or created fraudulent ID numbers. Full report on Mail & Guardian Online site

But that is not all. A ‘turnaround team’ of experts has also been appointed to straighten out the department. Business Day says the team will be headed by former Chamber of Business CE Kevin Wakeford. The establishment of the team follows hard on the heels of the appointment of the department’s seventh director-general since 1994. Mavuso Msimang, who has a reputation for troubleshooting, took up his post last week. Mapisa-Nqakula said the team included private and public sector experts from a number of fields and has been tasked with creating a radically more efficient Home Affairs structure able to fight corruption effectively and deliver services on time. The team will include a task force from the treasury to help with establishing sound financial processes. Full Business Day report

Home Affairs is not the only problem department. Government departments in the Free State and the Northern Cape have been identified as being riddled with corruption and unable to provide basic services to the public, notes a report on the Mail & Guardian Online site. According to the DA, an enormous gulf exists between the levels of service provided by different provinces. In a study it found that the worst places to live if you were dependent on the government for health, education, housing and other services was the Northern Cape, the Free State and the Eastern Cape – given the copious evidence of corruption and neglect there. The best functioning provinces were the Western Cape, Gauteng and the North West. The DA analysed the AG\'s reports for 2005/06 for each of the 27 departments to see how effectively they carried out their responsibilities in each province. The worst two departments in the country appeared to be the Free State Housing Department and the Northern Cape Health Department, with both departments being ‘so riddled with corruption, maladministration and inefficiency that their capacity to carry out their functions is massively impeded’. However, some special interventions were required for weaker provinces, and particular departments within these provinces, to allow them to deliver on their mandates more effectively. The reports made it clear that the interventions required did not revolve around money, but rather around the enforcement of good governance practices. Full report on Mail & Guardian Online site

The DA has also raised another thorny issue. It says it is going to submit parliamentary questions to a number of government departments to ascertain whether share awards allegedly given to them by Sexwale may have caused any conflict of interests. This follows a weekend report that Sexwale may have given free Batho Bonke shares to a number of senior ANC officials, their relatives and other influential people in the public sector, according to The Witness. Sexwale has been accused by critics of using shares in Absa, held through the Batho Bonke BEE consortium, to buy patronage in his bid for the presidency. Full report in The Witness

It is not only the opposition that is worried about rampant corruption. High Court judge Mojalela Rampai has told students and academics at Zululand University that the loss of state resources through corruption and inept use is a violation of the government\'s obligation to realise social and economic rights in the country. The Mercury quotes Rampai as saying effective and credible public agencies must be set up to monitor the proper use and distribution of state resources – especially those earmarked for poverty alleviation. ‘The executive organ of the state is in the forefront of service. The expectations of the poor are high, but the state resources are scarce. ‘But while the government can claim scarcity of resources to justify failure to realise these (socio-economic) rights, it is also required to devise means of boosting the available resources.’ Full report in The Mercury (subscription needed)