Another regime change and the Cape Town city administration will collapse: that is the judgement of many people who work there. Off the record, it’s no less dire and compelling.
In the civic centre, a senior city-council official confides across his desk that the municipal administration cannot withstand another political transition. “The wheels had come off, we were driving on the rims,” he says, having weathered the latest restructuring. “We are only working out now how much on the rims we are.”
This view comes up frequently among past and present officials, mostly off the record. The repeated restructuring of the staff with its exodus of skilled employees over the past decade has ground the city down; morale is in freefall.
Since 1996, the city council has spent millions of rands exploring new city designs and ridding itself of senior civil servants to facilitate politically palatable bureaucracies for new incumbents.
The skill shedding comes at a time when challenges for the city have rapidly escalated, as it battles to accommodate an expanding population and huge demands on service delivery. It has also to gear up for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Yet its human resources policies have destabilised its workforce. It’s been losing engineers, planners, firefighters, inspectors and electricians monthly for years.
Untold story
The story of Cape Town’s restructuring has never fully been told. Fragmented glimpses of hiring and firing, jumping and pushing, redeployment and realignment have been reported piecemeal. There are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, the negotiations around the restructuring involved so many secret golden handshakes that few departing civil servants wanted to speak out. Confidentiality clauses hid the true extent of what was a massive and ongoing human resources bungle in an organisation of 23 000 people, tasked to utilise a budget of about R17-billion for the greater good of one of South Africa’s most important cities.
Another reason is the complexity of the interrupted restructuring processes. An official observes that documents detailing city restructuring stand 1,5m high in his office, representing millions of rands of unfinished business.
The frequent changing of the political guard happened in parallel to structural changes in the city as it consolidated from 35 municipalities to seven administrations to a single centralised unicity over the past decade. National policy, including affirmative action, overlaid municipal transformation. The politics of Cape Town, reflecting its racially divided communities, added its own poison.
Each new political party in power wanted its own people on top. This is understandable because politicians need to choose managers who are inspired to implement their policies. But as the DA and the ANC have shuffled in and out of government, there have been far-reaching consequences to this drive, which has spiralled out of control. It started small but developed into a trend that destabilises service delivery…Full Story M&G
In the civic centre, a senior city-council official confides across his desk that the municipal administration cannot withstand another political transition. “The wheels had come off, we were driving on the rims,” he says, having weathered the latest restructuring. “We are only working out now how much on the rims we are.”
This view comes up frequently among past and present officials, mostly off the record. The repeated restructuring of the staff with its exodus of skilled employees over the past decade has ground the city down; morale is in freefall.
Since 1996, the city council has spent millions of rands exploring new city designs and ridding itself of senior civil servants to facilitate politically palatable bureaucracies for new incumbents.
The skill shedding comes at a time when challenges for the city have rapidly escalated, as it battles to accommodate an expanding population and huge demands on service delivery. It has also to gear up for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Yet its human resources policies have destabilised its workforce. It’s been losing engineers, planners, firefighters, inspectors and electricians monthly for years.
Untold story
The story of Cape Town’s restructuring has never fully been told. Fragmented glimpses of hiring and firing, jumping and pushing, redeployment and realignment have been reported piecemeal. There are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, the negotiations around the restructuring involved so many secret golden handshakes that few departing civil servants wanted to speak out. Confidentiality clauses hid the true extent of what was a massive and ongoing human resources bungle in an organisation of 23 000 people, tasked to utilise a budget of about R17-billion for the greater good of one of South Africa’s most important cities.
Another reason is the complexity of the interrupted restructuring processes. An official observes that documents detailing city restructuring stand 1,5m high in his office, representing millions of rands of unfinished business.
The frequent changing of the political guard happened in parallel to structural changes in the city as it consolidated from 35 municipalities to seven administrations to a single centralised unicity over the past decade. National policy, including affirmative action, overlaid municipal transformation. The politics of Cape Town, reflecting its racially divided communities, added its own poison.
Each new political party in power wanted its own people on top. This is understandable because politicians need to choose managers who are inspired to implement their policies. But as the DA and the ANC have shuffled in and out of government, there have been far-reaching consequences to this drive, which has spiralled out of control. It started small but developed into a trend that destabilises service delivery…Full Story M&G
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