Amanda Jitsing

In September 2013, the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation released the findings of the Management Performance Assessment Tool (MPAT). The MPAT assesses the management practices of national and provincial departments in four key performance areas: strategic management, governance and accountability, human resource and financial management. Barring some issues around the validity of self-assessment tools, the MPAT results yield interesting insights into the way government works.

In particular, the scores around governance and accountability mechanisms are low. Accountability mechanisms include service delivery charters and service standards. Only one in every two national departments has service standards in place. As this is one of the few areas in MPAT that examines how government departments relate to the beneficiaries and users of their services, the results are alarming. The report explains that a “number of national departments did not understand the policy requirements for service standards and service delivery improvement plans”. In particular, national departments thought that service standards only applied to those departments directly involved in the delivery of public services such as the Departments of Home Affairs, Social Development and Police.

There are two distinct and important issues worth raising when it comes to service standards. Firstly, some national departments provide public services on a daily basis to millions of South Africans and have weak MPAT scores for governance and accountability. This is of course absurd. Failure by these departments to report against or comply with service standards could have a severe impact on the beneficiaries of the services they provide. Take for instance the court challenge involving the Department of Social Development over the delays in funding of non-governmental organisations. These organisations are responsible for delivering a large part of the welfare service and are highly dependent on government funding. In part, this court challenge stems from the frustration of NGOs in communicating with government on their funding applications. Such blockages and the resulting court costs might have been avoided if the Department has spelled out simple and clear service standards.

Secondly, national departments are accountable for the delivery of public services in those broad areas of service delivery where national, provincial and local government share legislative powers. For these functions, national departments are meant to set and monitor service standards. By setting service standards, national government influences the level and quality of public services delivered in provincial and local government.

Consider for example the Department of Water Affairs, which has issued a standard that says that no consumer should be without water supply for more than seven full days in any year. We know from a recent Carte Blanche report that certain parts of Grahamstown in the Makana municipality have been without water for eight consecutive days in the last month and that water cuts are frequent. This national standard is clearly not complied with, possibly because the municipality does not monitor this service standard. Moreover, there are probably no service standards in place that require the municipality to communicate progress in repairing the infrastructure and to respond to enquiries.

Service standards are meant to engender a constructive relationship between government and its citizens. For government, they become a form of self-regulation – where service standards are set and monitored. For citizens, they are a mechanism to hold government accountable for the quality of their services. Without these service standards, government can forget who they are meant to serve!