The National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) at the weekend joined in the war of words against Minister in the Presidency for National Planning Trevor Manuel, labelling him a hypocrite and a politically frustrated “point scorer”.
While this time the clash between Manuel – who is the chairman of the National Planning Commission – did not directly involve union criticism of the National Development Plan (NDP), it focused on one of the elements of the plan which calls for the appropriate skills set in the public sector to promote inclusive and fair economic growth.
Nehawu said it was hard not to draw the conclusion that behind the new-found “service delivery activism” from Manuel “lurks some political frustration”.
“He has always preferred to be the one who sets the agenda,” the union, which represents about 235 000 public servants, charged.
Spokesman Sizwe Pamla said Manuel had grown “disillusioned” when pre-2007 attempts to erode the supremacy of Luthuli House, the ANC political headquarters, had failed.
His decision to refuse nomination to the ANC NEC at the elective conference at Mangaung in December “was just a ploy to get out of the confines of the collective leadership and continue to act as an independent maverick”.
Nehawu said it viewed Manuel’s statement on service delivery challenges “as hypocritical and insincere… Comrade Trevor Manuel chastised ANC members employed in government for what he called their loyalty to the party at the expense of South Africans”.
The former finance minister attracted front-page attention after a government leadership summit in Pretoria on Wednesday, when he said that the time for blaming poor service delivery on apartheid was over.
Sapa reported him as saying: ”Almost without exception public servants and we as ministers come from the same activist background, but what we must ensure is that even if we are members of the same political organisation… that is not carried into the workplace.”
The emphasis had to fall on professionalism, he argued.
While Manuel had raised “some valid and indisputable points about the need to improve service delivery, fighting corruption and also of serving South Africans irrespective of their political persuasion, he is not being totally honest,” Pamla said.
“He intentionally conflates issues by creating an impression that the weaknesses of government are as a result of ANC members working in government. He is also not being honest when he wants us to pretend that apartheid never existed. His statement that we cannot ‘blame everything on apartheid anymore’ is dishonest.”
Manuel had been “an enthusiastic advocate” of a lean and mean state that weakened government structures and left some departments with no clear human resource strategies.
“In the health sector, this has resulted in the reduced capacity for the public sector to deliver the required services,” Nehawu said.
Noting that between 1996 – when Manuel became finance minister – and 2007 spending on public health decreased, the union argued that this led to vacant posts not being filled, infrastructure not being maintained and spending on consumables such as laundry being reduced.
While the ministry’s spokesman, Dumisa Jele, said the minister would not be commenting on the Nehawu statement, Manuel recently lashed out at the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa.
When its leader, Irvin Jim, accused the NDP of plagiarising the DA’s policies, Manuel saw red. He quoted Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin’s 1920 work Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder – a Leninist attack on the Bolsheviks – to rebuke him: “Mr Jim suffers from an infantile disorder that manifests as an acute aversion to anything rational.”