PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND EVALUATION AS WELL AS ADMINISTRATION: Chairperson, His Excellency President Jacob Zuma, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, Ministers and Deputy Ministers, chairpersons of portfolio committees, hon members, honourable guests, friends and comrades, members of the media, ladies and gentlemen, I stand here before you on this august occasion, still remembering our stalwart and dedicated soldier of our struggle for the emancipation of our people. I stand here to salute and pay tribute to our beloved mother who left us in what feels like just yesterday, Mama Albertina Sisulu. Our tears are still very fresh and the wounds too deep to heal instantly. Umama Albertina was the epitome of selflessness. She was always willing to get her hands dirty in the name of helping others. It is therefore befitting that we should follow her example by ensuring that quality service delivery is the order of the day in our localities.
We have just come out of the local government election where, once again, South Africans of all colour and creed came out in their numbers to demonstrate their passion and commitment to this democratic dispensation, which was born in 1994 through the ballot. We want to congratulate all parties who participated in the election and especially the ANC for registering an overwhelming majority victory once again. [Applause.] As a fitting tribute to Mama Sisulu, we must continue with gusto to address the historical, social and economic factors that limited our people's access to services.
Hon President, I want to say the following: don't listen to the people who say there is no monitoring and evaluation. There is performance monitoring and evaluation, and I think people must appreciate that this initiative is a good initiative and that our people accept and love it. All over the country, wherever we go, when we interact with our people in nongovernmental organisations, NGOs, the public sector and everywhere else, including the community-based organisations, CBOs, they ask us one question: how can we contribute to the performance monitoring and evaluation of our own government? That means that we are doing a good job and it means, hon President, that you have introduced a very good tool for monitoring the work of government. [Applause.]
Today I am privileged to participate for the first time in the Budget Vote of The Presidency. The executive has made a firm commitment to improving the quality and standard of service delivery across all spheres of government, permeating through all organs of state. At the heart of our monitoring and evaluation system is the consolidation of all service- improvement initiatives into a single, seamlessly integrated service delivery model for the whole country, underpinned by an effective corporate governance instrument in the form of service delivery agreements executed by various clusters and Ministries together with their provincial and local government counterparts. We are deeply encouraged by signs that this system is beginning to yield results in the form of discernable outcomes. Those who have never been into the villages and all the areas where our people stay are the only ones who will say they have not seen monitoring and evaluation being done. Once more, it is critical to highlight some of the strategic interventions that we intend to make in ensuring that our people receive quality service delivery at all levels of government. In ensuring that our mandate is clear and that there is co-ordination and synergy between national, provincial and local government, we have now visited seven provinces, and tomorrow I will visit the Western Cape executive council to discuss this co-ordination and synergy so that there is focus and impact on what we do as government, irrespective of our geographic location.
In almost all the provinces we visited we identified the following issues, among others: co-ordination of our work as Performance Monitoring and Evaluation department with the Planning Commission; reporting standards in all spheres of government; rationalisation and reporting standards at local government level; and the efficiency and co-ordination of Minmecs. During our departmental Budget Vote on 8 June 2011, we indicated that when we visited the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government, we found that they have a nerve centre that is assisting them to monitor financial information, poor spending - or nonspending - including overspending, nonfinancial information and annual performance plans, including departmental strategy plans. Their government gets a prompt helicopter view by just pressing a button, and it is rightly placed in the Office of the Premier. I must say that their system works, and we would like to congratulate the premier, the hon Dr Mkhize, and his team for displaying political leadership. [Applause.] The President has spoken about local government on several occasions, including today, and we want to say that we have begun to do the work, hon President. In our meetings a few months ago, we interacted with various stakeholders, including the National House of Traditional Leaders. With them, we emphasised the importance of working together in monitoring services at local level. We are aware that the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs is planning a national summit to address differences between councillors and traditional leaders. We encourage all our councillors and traditional leaders to work very closely for the betterment of our people's lives. We must indicate that The Presidency will not rest until we make progress on the five strategic objectives of the local government turnaround strategy, developed and adopted by government in 2009.
We have also met with Salga, because monitoring and evaluation of municipalities must involve relevant stakeholders like Salga. During our meeting in March this year, we agreed to work very closely and monitor local government programmes together without fail. We are planning to meet with MuniMecs to ensure that our monitoring and evaluation strategy at local government is intact and the above local government turnaround strategy objectives are met and evaluated at that level. We shall monitor all special projects with zeal and character, for example, Operation Hlasela by the Office of the Premier of the Free State. We strongly believe their strategic focus has the potential to change the lives of our people, improve financial management and fight corrupt tendencies.
Once again, the focus of monitoring is on the targets relating to service delivery quality in the delivery agreement for Outcome 12, namely customer satisfaction, unit cost of services and other key customer-oriented indicators, such as waiting times in queues and response times. Therefore we shall continue to interact with stakeholders, citizens and all members of civil society. We shall not be trapped in a desktop approach to monitoring. Our approach is active participation, direct to citizens. We shall never monitor government services sitting in our offices.
This system has enabled us to accurately measure the impact of our plans on the citizenry and to hold accountable the various implementing authorities to the commitments that the ANC made at the last election in 2009. The concept of regular unannounced visits to service delivery centres like hospitals, schools, driving licence testing centres, Home Affairs offices and municipal offices will become an integral part of our day-to-day system of monitoring and evaluation of service delivery. These, we believe, will go a long way towards fostering and intensifying a face-to-face and unmediated engagement with our communities and bringing government to the people. Although these take the form of surprise visits, we also engage with the management of the service delivery points both before and after the visits. The aim is to provide them with useful toolkits to monitor and improve service delivery. The aim of frontline service delivery monitoring is to both affirm good performance and assist departments, municipalities and entities to improve service delivery points that are performing poorly.
The Government Communication and Information System, GCIS, continues to strengthen provincial and local government communication by ensuring concrete communication initiatives for effective provincial and local government communication, which include the intensification of face-to-face and unmediated engagement with communities and localising national content every day.
Government remains committed to a strong and diverse media which will support nation-building, as well as efforts to deepen, consolidate, defend and strengthen our democracy, social cohesion and good governance. This responsibility rests with the Media Development and Diversity Agency, MDDA.
Regarding the Presidential Hotline, The Presidency is currently working with other departments and spheres of government to address issues raised with the President by citizens through the Presidential Hotline. We follow through on all the issues raised there and, where necessary, visit citizens in their communities to interact with them face to face. This ANC government has a responsibility to respond to all the needs of our people, regardless of their geographical positions, and that is what this government is doing. As Minister Chabane indicated last year ... [Time expired.]