Madam Deputy Speaker, for some years now I have been teaching public finance at a local university and the vast majority of more than 400- odd students I have taught over this period have come from the public sector, various municipalities, all of the provincial governments, national government and even from the National Treasury.
Now, public finance in the modern, public-sector world is a wide-ranging subject within which matters of financial and delivery performance are central. And having chaired the subcommittee back in 1999 that put together the Public Finance Management Act, I am very aware that such matters of performance-linked financial management are a distinct part of that Act's reform intentions for our national and provincial governments.
Now, almost 10 years later, I believe it is true to say that while all our government institutions go through the PFMA motions, there are very few who really grasp and pursue the performance attitude and ethic we had hoped to achieve. And this is quite apparent from the generally poor quality of performance measures used to be found in departments' strategic plans and budgets, as well as from the weak and often ambiguous reporting of their performance achieved in the annual reports.
But for me this absence of performance mindshift is also very evident from study assignments I had my public sector students carry out around the subject matter of performance. It's clear the necessary preoccupation with workplace performance is just not there as it should be.
So, Minister, let me agree and disagree with you when you regularly, as you indeed did in your Budget Speech, implore parliamentary committees to raise the oversight standards in order to cause departments to raise their spending and delivery performance.
My analysis and observations would support your inferences of an adequate or an effectual oversight by committees. My personal experience, and through Scopa a number of years back, gives substance to your contention that committees can be quite influential and be something of a catalyst in having departments raise their performances. Of course, there are many other notable examples from other committees also.
But Minister, in this regard, I think you should point more publicly and more directly at the state institutions themselves and their political heads, who after all are constitutionally obligated to perform optimally and whose officials are, in fact, paid to do so. While I share your general frustration and your concerns, I do not think that the management shortcomings in question can be altogether solved through stronger parliamentary oversight. Rather, I would have to see a shift in approach from the National Treasury as to how in terms of its obligations in section 6(2) of the PFMA, it guides and advises the department and other entities in the application of the PFMA, the Treasury and the other relevant guidelines they produce.
As things presently stand, department officials tend to respond to these in exactly the same way as they responded to those vast sets of rules in the prereform era; and as such, they defensively follow the letter rather than the spirit of the PFMA, and indeed, the MFMA, meaning that the opportunities to be real managers, who constantly challenge themselves to improve value-for-money performance, are not grasped.
Of course, there is one notable exception, that being Sars. There, the performance dynamic is very evident. Each year Sars sets and then beats a comprehensive range of raised performance targets which they set for themselves. Clearly, they are becoming performance-driven in a way which produces that self-perpetuating type of performance improvement as they go forward. By my calculations over the past eight years, efficiency and other performance gains made and sustained in subsequent years by Sars have contributed at least an additional R70 billion to the fiscus, which in turn must have played a big part in the much-acclaimed budgets the Minister has presented in recent years.
But returning to the issue, let's consider how much more these budgets could be enhanced by equivalent performance improvements across all the departments and other spending agencies. Surely there are expenditure efficiencies of at least a further R70 billion to be gained there.
However, while departments remain in a lethargic yesteryear paradigm and parliamentary oversight remains inadequate, this big opportunity for the Minister to allow for further expansion of government programmes and projects passes us by.
So, Mr Minister, I would respectfully suggest that you are the best-placed person to create and take forward an initiative that will properly investigate and then plan how best to imbue the urgently necessary performance mentality across all of government. Thank you. [Applause.]