My sabbatical from writing meant that when the government report card was released to some fanfare from Hospital Hill, I missed the opportunity to offer my two cents’ worth.
But now that I have found my mojo again (and am on some kind of roll), I thought that this week, rather than revisit The Luke Commission saga following Labour and Social Security Minister Phila Buthelezi comments on some online platform, I felt that I owe readers of this column a thought or two on the recently released report card.
It was not difficult to understand why the Cabinet report card failed to strike the right chord with the public – or, for that matter, with a significant number of the ministers whose performance it purported to measure.
A majority of ministers appeared unhappy either with the report itself or with the criteria used to arrive at their scores.
On the face of it, some had been publicly exposed as having glaringly underperformed. Curiously, even some of those who emerged with impressive scores appeared uncomfortable with the glowing assessment they received, ask Bongani Nzima. Yet the prime minister’s posture towards the report was markedly different.
Never mind his own modest score, Prime Minister Russell Mmiso Dlamini appeared to regard the exercise as a significant step in the right direction; evidence that government was institutionalising a performance management system that could, over time, improve accountability and ultimately service delivery. That, perhaps, is where the real significance of this report card lies.
Unfortunately, that message was almost immediately drowned out by questions about methodology.
The PPCU, identified as having conducted the assessment, came under heavy criticism over the manner in which the data was applied. Ministries and government departments questioned whether the assessment was comparing like with like and whether the indicators used adequately reflected their different mandates and operating environments. Then there was the structure of the report itself.
Not all ministries appeared in the assessment. Some government departments were included while others were not. More confusingly, some departments that were assessed appeared to outperform the ministries under which they fall. The inevitable result was confusion and controversy and some sheepish reaction by those in the departments.
Instead of the report card being received primarily as an attempt to strengthen accountability and demonstrate government’s commitment to service delivery, public discourse became dominated by who scored what, who had been treated unfairly and whether the methodology itself could withstand scrutiny.
Yet there is a danger that, in all this noise, the bigger picture could be missed. The performance management of ministries and government departments must surely be understood against the policy direction that emerged from Sibaya and subsequently shaped the mandate of this government and its Nkwe programme.
The nation was unequivocal at Sibaya about its frustration with poor service delivery. That frustration helped define the expectations placed upon the current administration and, arguably, influenced the choice of Mmiso Dlamini to lead a government expected to translate public frustration into measurable delivery.
Seen from this perspective, the prime minister’s enthusiasm for the report card becomes understandable.
Going into the third year of his term, he can point to the exercise as evidence that government is attempting to implement the expectations that emerged from Sibaya: ministers must perform, ministries must deliver and somebody must ultimately account.
It also allows the prime minister to begin crafting a particular narrative around his administration – that his much-talked-about disruptive leadership style is producing a government in which performance is not merely spoken about but measured.
Coming amid whispers in political corridors about the possibility of another Sibaya, that political dimension cannot simply be ignored.
The prime minister may well be putting down a marker, and critically that he is capable of implementing the nation’s policy and mandate – and measure Cabinet’s performance.
But the reaction from within government has exposed another problem altogether. If one follows the debate that ensued, particularly the sharply differing views from within Hospital Hill itself, it becomes apparent that Cabinet may not even have a common understanding of how performance should be measured – or, more fundamentally, what constitutes delivery under the Nkwe mandate.
That is a much bigger problem than an imperfect report card. Consider, for example, the deputy prime minister’s office and its programme of providing decent homes to vulnerable elderly citizens.
Whatever technical indicators may ultimately determine a ministry’s score, it would be difficult to argue that such an intervention does not represent the kind of tangible service delivery ordinary citizens expect from government.
The work undertaken by Deputy Prime Minister Thuli Dladla in this area deserves recognition. Against limited resources, growing demand and the practical difficulties associated with delivering such projects, the programme has continued to produce something citizens can see, touch and experience.
That matters, no matter what indicators are used to measure the performance of the DPM’s office – and the timeliness of such reports being filed for the measurement.
One may argue that a performance scorecard cannot simply measure the activities or visibility of individual ministers. Fair enough. But government would equally be missing the point if its performance management system failed to recognise interventions that produce tangible improvements in people’s lives.
After all, what is the Nkwe mandate ultimately supposed to achieve? Surely it cannot simply be about ticking boxes, completing activities or producing impressive percentages on spreadsheets. At some point, performance must translate into impact.
The challenges facing citizens are real and practical. The solutions must therefore be felt in equally real and practical ways.
Where the DPM’s Office – or any other ministry – finds a way of delivering projects that make a meaningful difference to citizens, Cabinet should collectively claim and celebrate that success.
Indeed, the prime minister should be able to point to such interventions as evidence that his government is delivering.
And this is perhaps where the controversy surrounding the report card becomes most revealing. The real story may not ultimately be who scored 40%, 60% or 80%. It may be what the reaction to those scores tells us about Cabinet itself.
There has been a glaring absence of collective responsibility in the manner ministers have responded to controversies surrounding government performance.
Increasingly, ministers appear comfortable publicly distinguishing their individual positions from those of colleagues or from decisions associated with government collectively.
We have seen manifestations of this in Parliament and on other public platforms. The reaction to the report card merely adds another chapter. Rather than Cabinet collectively asking what the assessment says about the government’s ability to deliver on its mandate, much of the debate has centred on individual ministries defending their scores, disputing the methodology or explaining why their circumstances are different.
Some of those concerns may be entirely legitimate. Indeed, any performance management system worthy of credibility must be transparent, consistent and capable of comparing performance fairly. If the methodology is defective, it must be corrected. If indicators do not properly reflect the mandates of particular ministries, they must be refined.
Performance management cannot become an exercise in producing politically convenient numbers. But neither should legitimate questions about methodology obscure the principle behind the exercise.
Government must be measured. Ministers must be held accountable. And citizens are entitled to know whether the administration that promised accelerated service delivery is actually delivering.
More importantly, Cabinet must understand that it succeeds or fails collectively.
The success of the DPM’s office is not merely Thuli Dladla’s success, it is success for the government led by Mmiso Dlamini.
Likewise, the failure of another ministry cannot conveniently be isolated as the problem of the minister occupying that portfolio.
That is what collective responsibility means. A Cabinet cannot enthusiastically claim the successes of government while individual ministers distance themselves from its failures. Nor can ministers celebrate favourable assessments when they score well but dismiss the entire performance management system when the numbers become uncomfortable.
Perhaps, then, the first Cabinet report card has achieved something its architects may not have anticipated. It has exposed not only questions about government performance, but questions about the cohesion of the government itself.
And that may ultimately be more important than the scores. Because if Cabinet is divided into silos that ministers cannot recognise the successes of colleagues as collective government achievements – while equally accepting collective responsibility for failures – then the problem is no longer simply how performance is measured.
The problem is what Cabinet understands itself to be.
There is certainly room to improve the report card. Its methodology must be credible, its indicators transparent and its application consistent. Government must also explain more clearly what is being measured and why.
But Cabinet has some introspection of its own to do. Before perfecting the instrument by which ministers and ministries are measured, it may first need to reach a common understanding of what performance means, what the Nkwe mandate demands of government collectively and what collective responsibility requires of every member sitting around the Cabinet table. Otherwise, the report card risks becoming something entirely different from what was intended. Instead of measuring government’s progress towards improved service delivery, it may simply become the most revealing measure yet of the divisions within Cabinet.
