THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD
The Democratic Alliance recently released an analysis of the number of vacancies in national government departments for 2007. The figures make for alarming reading and go some way toward explaining poor service delivery in certain key portfolios.
There were two elements to the DA’s analysis, which was based on information contained in each department’s annual report. On the one hand, the party worked out an overall vacancy rate for each department and across all 29 departments. On the other hand, it worked out a specific rate for highly skilled positions, again, both within each department and across all 29. It then compared the two figures.
There is one caveat though: all-in-all there are some 390 000 posts across all government departments, but three departments alone are responsible for 77 % or 300 000 of those: Safety and Security, Correctional Services and Defence. So, in order to get a more accurate idea of how the problem affects the remaining 26, it is necessary to exclude the three biggest.
That said, across all departments, the general vacancy rate was around 10 % but, excluding the three biggest, it jumps to 22 %. Among highly skilled positions the problem is even more acute: across all departments the highly skilled vacancy rate is 13 % and when one excludes the three biggest it jumps to 31 %. Significantly, the general rate has decreased marginally from 2006 but the highly skilled vacancy rate has increased by some 3 % from the previous year.
In absolute terms, across all departments the 10 % vacancy rate translates into around 40 500 vacant posts, which drops to just under 19 000 without the three biggest. With regard to highly skilled positions, across all departments around 26 000 of these posts are vacant - 13 500 if you exclude the three biggest.
Quite clearly then, the more specialised the position, the more government is struggling to acquire and retain the requisite skills.
As with any comparative analysis, some departments fared better than others. Let’s expand on one example, by way of illustrating how a high vacancy rate hampers service delivery.
The department of sport and recreation fared particularly badly. In percentage terms, it has the highest general vacancy rate of all departments - 46 % (95 of its 207 posts are vacant). In 2006, it had a general vacancy rate of 47 %, so the situation isn’t improving. Nor is it any better with regard to highly skilled positions. Here the department has a 47 % vacancy rate (69 out of 147 posts), the second highest rate of all departments. Again, the situation is no different from 2006, when it also had a 47 % vacancy rate for highly skilled positions.
The question is: how does a department function properly when it is so seriously under-staffed? Quite simply, it doesn’t.
One need look no further than Auditor-General’s 2007 report on the department for the hard evidence. This year the A-G qualified his opinion of the department’s performance. A qualified opinion means, in assessing the way in which that department has managed its finances and implemented its program of action, the A-G cannot give a proper or full assessment because certain areas are highly problematic - he has to ‘qualify’ his opinion.
But there weren’t just one or two areas that where the A-G expressed concern, there were thirteen, a substantial, rapid and fundamental deterioration from 2006, in which the A-G essentially awarded the department a clean report (i.e. not a single thing wrong).
A point of qualification is a serious matter and to receive thirteen is an indictment. They ranged from the mismanagement of performance bonuses, to incomplete financial statements, to missing and unaccounted-for capital assets.
It is certainly valid to point out that the department also had a high vacancy rate in 2006 - when it got a cle
| Posted on 7/2/2008
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