NEHAWU strongly rejects and will totally oppose any attempts by the Western Cape Premier Helen Zille to centralize organizational and political control of certain functions in the different provincial departments to her office through the so called Modernisation process.

The union is disturbed that this process has and will result in a lot of public servants losing their jobs and this comes against the background of high unemployment and demands for the state to create more jobs.

This follows the failure of a series of meetings between the Premier’s office and labour where presentations were made that were intended  to give more clarity and detail about this proposed Modernization process. We believe that these meetings were nothing more than a charade meant to hoodwink us into rubber stamping this process in order to give the premier unlimited powers.

We are aware that in December 2009 the provincial Cabinet met and approved the proposed Modernization programme without consulting labour. This Modernization process according to us is nothing but a restructuring exercise that will allow the Premier to have control over all appointments throughout the Provincial Government.

The Premier’s office argues that it wants to set up an organisational structure that will optimally support the Premier and Director-General in discharging their key statutory and other key mandates. They say that in order to do this they want to set up a separate corporate services unit in the office of the Premier for the whole provincial government. 

We do not buy into this argument and we believe that the office of the Premier wants to centralise organisational and political control of certain functions in the different provincial government departments and will implement this decision through a restructuring exercise. 

They have explicitly stated their intention to populate the office with appropriately skilled and competent employees and also establish measures and protocols to manage human resource implications that will arise from the modernization process. 

The results of this will be that all these departments will lose the functions of Human Resource Management, Enterprise Risk Management (Supply Chain, Procurements, Tenders Etc.) Internal Audit, Communications Services etc. In the event the issue is about capacity, there are official skills development processes  to remedy the service delivery constraints if any.

These functions will now be housed in a single unit in the office of the Premier, called Corporate Services and the new envisaged Personnel Plan will deal with the  staff who are not absorbed into the new macro structure created through this exercise.

The union objects to this because the envisaged number of staff that will be declared in surplus is estimated at about 200 and the provincial departments which have already been restructured have created more problems in relation to service delivery and efficiency of the machinery.

The restructuring of the Department of Health in the province was not properly funded which has resulted to a serious shortage of staff and very poor service delivery to working class communities. The covert but ongoing restructuring process in the province has lacked transparency because we have not been informed about the costs, implications on service delivery and the benefits of all the previous restructuring exercises.

This modernisation exercise is about party political control of state machinery and its technocrats and has less to do with service delivery and an efficient state machinery. We strongly object to this process and want the provincial government to stop with all of these permanent restructuring exercises and to redirect its focus and energies to service delivery.