Johannesburg - Auditor-general Terence Nombembe, who steps down at the end of the month after serving a seven-year term, doesn’t believe that the average senior management public servant – most of whom earn R1 million a year or more – is overpaid.
Interviewed in his Cape Town office after a retirement party at Parliament, Nombembe said: “Our view as an office is that we must all extract the value (from) those public servants (ensuring) that they are delivering the kind of work that is equivalent to their compensation.”
The holder of the auditor-general’s mantle can only serve one term.
While combined national and provincial government is spending about 40 percent of its budget on public servants, the figure for provincial government is at a rather high 60 percent, as reported in the medium-term budget policy statement by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
Nombembe, however, believed that salaries in the public sector needed to be benchmarked against the private sector and international examples. “If we pitch (state salaries) at ridiculously low levels, we are going to have trouble attracting good quality skills in the public service,” he said. Nombembe earns R2.65m a year.
He declined to comment on whether there were too many public servants, indicating that this was a political question that needed to be directed at politicians rather than to him as a public servant and a fiscal watchdog.
Nevertheless, he acknowledged that there remained a problem. He has repeatedly called on political office bearers – particularly mayors in town and city councils – to lead by example. Senior managers including directors-general, deputy directors-general and chief directors needed to play by the rules, providing government with “the right financial information, which is accurate and credible”.
Pressed on whether this senior management service were actually listening to the auditor-general’s advice, he said there were departments that were doing so and, indeed, there were departments that were not.
Where there were problems, he said, these arose out of the absence of the right people in particular jobs. He did not point out which jobs were not being done properly, but said it was up to the political principals – such as ministers, premiers and MECs – to ensure that these problems were attended to.
Was it not a problem of ANC deployment of cadres in the public service that led to poorly performing ministers? Nombembe said: “That is the nature of politics.”
However, there needed to be a constant dialogue between the auditor-general’s office, politicians and bureaucrats to induce good governance.
A mayor of a town needed to show leadership and understand where the municipality was going wrong. That mayor needed to have the skills to ensure that when it was pointed out that something was wrong, he gave the direction to fix it, Nombembe said.
He would not divulge where he would be working from December, but he would be replaced by his deputy, Kimi Makwetu.
It is expected that the audit outcomes for national and provincial government departments, as well as more than 100 of the 750 public entities, will be released this week. Nombembe was not optimistic that there would be an improvement in the R30 billion reported as wasteful expenditure in the 2012 financial year.