The Empowerment of the Public Service Commission to Implement the Professionalization Framework in the South African Public Sector: A Systematic Alignment Analysis

Abstract

The South African public service is currently marred by a lot of challenges, and this has resulted into a serious loss of trust from the public and even payment for services is on the downward spiral. This is supported by the ever-rising households debt especially in municipal services such as water, sanitation, electricity and waste. Residents are not only finding it unaffordable to pay for these services but are fed up paying for erratic and poor services. This perception cuts across all government services and seems to be the order of the day even with those services that are provided by provincial and national government departments. There are many challenges within government institutions that have led to this quagmire and these include erosion of professionalism, incompetent officials who are unable to provide services, fraud and corruption that is rife in the public sector which robs communities of their rightful financial resources, political corruption where some of the politicians have resorted into self-enrichment at the expense of their communities which has led to a rift between community representatives and their communities; etc. The erosion of professionalization in the South African public sector seems to be the main cause of these challenges at least from the administration point of view. However, this phenomenon of erosion of professionalization also has political influence as part of the root causes of the evident challenges in government. Political influence has led to the appointment of incompetent officials and has increased corruption in the public sector where the same officials who are appointed irregularly get protection from politicians by doing them corrupt favours. This vicious cycle eventually affects communities who will ultimately not get services. Corruptive practices have now been endemic culture in the public service and have graduated even into sabotage of services where companies that are contracted for maintenance of government infrastructure deliberately vandalize it to get more work or orders. This has been prevalent in water and electricity infrastructure. There are instruments that have been developed by the South African government to deal with these challenges. One instrument that can address administrative challenges is the Professionalization Framework which, among other things, calls for ethical, capacitated and developmental state served by the same calibre of officials. The Framework alone will not solve the challenges but needs levers for its successful implementation. A bold move to review the Public Service Commission Act of 1994 was taken in 2023 with an intention of facilitating the implementation of the Professionalization Framework amongst other things. This study therefore systematically analyzes the alignment between the Professionalization Framework and the Public Service Commission Amendment Bill of 2023 to see if the latter will help in the implementation of the former.