The City of Johannesburg has become a behemoth of an organisation with over 30,000 employees spread across seven regions, nine if you include the split regions of D and F. Understandably so when those who run the metropolis are expected to serve a population equalling that of New Zealand.
The City of Johannesburg’s administration has grown exponentially over the years, with little thought given to the impact of this when revenue declines, grants are lost, or investment diminishes. The classical liberal principles of limited government have been abandoned by statist central planners in favour of an ever-expanding, unwieldly, and bloated municipality.
However, while the ‘State of Johannesburg’ may be responsible for looking after millions of residents and businesses, one must always remember it’s core mandate is the provision of essential human services known in South Africa as ‘basic services’.
The focus should be on getting water and power to families while removing their refuse and fixing the streets they live or work on, but this is encumbered and hindered by a corpulent and confused monstrous organism known as the City of Johannesburg.
Unfortunately, the political ideologues who led previous and current administrations have forgotten to manage municipal finances and structures in a manner that focused on adhering to the Bill of Rights and thereby ensuring the provision of water, electricity, and liveable environments for all residents.
The current paradigm, based on statist beliefs of the ANC and its proxy parties, believes an ever-expanding state is a good thing, and this is posited as a key success of the organisation instead of providing basic services or even creating working environments that care for the increasing number of bureaucrats being hired or promoted.
The redesign of the City’s administration
An institutional review (the public sector term for an organisational redesign) was last done in 2002, and a full institutional review has been lobbied for by some more competent and qualified officials within the administration. This has been postponed and delayed for years, but since the brief tenure of former Mayor Mpho Phalatse the process to procure the expertise of consultants who can go about restructuring the administration was formally initiated.
Unfortunately, the contracting of organisational development and change management consultants who can undertake this mammoth task (which involves redesigning structures and processes for both the core departments and the municipal-owned entities) has been stalled and delayed for the last two years.
Getting the right service providers needs to be managed carefully, as this rejigging of the entire administration is inherently contentious and controversial – but it is urgently needed to reduce wastage, maladministration, and malfeasance. An institutional review could ultimately prevent the bad things that impede on effective governance, revenue generation, infrastructure development, and service delivery.
The idea of a clearly defined purpose is a key philosophy within the field of organisational development, and with the review and redesign of City this should take the administration back to its main purpose: providing basic services and improving basic living standards.
This would possibly mean rethinking the mandates, sizes, delegated powers, and even titles of core departments and their sub-units known as directorates.
The City’s organisational development capacity
While many companies and most governments (at all three tiers of government) have an organisational development function, the City of Joburg has a tiny office capacitated by very few accredited and fully trained organisational development practitioners or specialists. Most of the human resources and shared services staff have not worked in the private sector and are therefore unaware of organisation design best practice, and they are not exposed to it by the city.
Perhaps the City should adopt some processes and organisational frameworks that can guide the type of people, roles, processes, and technology they need to succeed when it comes to improving the provision of municipal services and infrastructure development.
The Establishment and Adaptation Framework, created by consultant and facilitator Craig Yeatman of WorldsView Academy for Organisational Change, is based on sociologist Émile Durkheim’s structuration theory. In a nutshell the framework helps senior executives and leaders reflect on how the employees and leadership of the City can adapt to, and even change, the established conditions of the City and the current institutional setup of the municipality.
There is little reflection on how employees are affected by (and must adapt to) a growing City with increasing demands from residents, civil society stakeholders, and the private sector. The solution to most problems and demands from a growing populace is to grow organograms and create more directorates; more functions; more staffed programmes; and, to hire more workers to make up frontline teams that are never properly capacitated, trained, or even looked after.
In essence, the City’s administration is reminiscent of the gourmandian Mr Creosote scene from the classic film ‘Monty Python’s Meaning of Life’.
Ongoing themes of duplication and expansion
One example of a bulging yet inefficient administration is the Augmented Field Services (AFS) Units, which operate under the umbrella of the City’s region-based Citizen Relations and Urban Management function known by officials and councillors as ‘Crum’.
However, you would be hard pressed to find a resident who says they know what the “Citizen Relations and Urban Management” directorate is, or whether it actually ever assisted them to restore their services or clean their area. In any case the AFS units are now assisting with field work that should be the responsibility of various municipal entities – they are cleaning parks for City Parks; they are cleaning roads for the Johannesburg Roads Agency, and they are cleaning up silt left on roads and pavements by Johannesburg Water.
Another example is the newly established ‘Youth directorate’ which sits within the Mayor’s Office and has been tasked with assisting young residents to find training, education, or business opportunities. This directorate is already filled with high-level officials receiving large salaries and is in many ways duplicating work done by other youth-focused programmes and functions within Group Corporate and Shared Services and the City’s Economic Development department.
One major issue is the lack of performance management which allows for silos; duplicated functions and roles; a lack of adherence to standard processes (and even municipal legislation and regulations); and ultimately gaps in service delivery, as no one knows who is responsible due to non-existent or poorly defined key performance indicators (KPIs).
Insufficient performance management (and non-existent scorecards) has also led to a lack of intentional change management due to a generally poor analysis of the health of the organisation.
The much-needed Institutional Review Process (IRP) could be likened to sending a sick patient to a room full of medical specialists who can immediately diagnose and provide remedies, in this case, to the ills of the City’s unwieldly and unruly administration.
The corporatisation of service delivery
Another major issue that needs to be considered for the long-awaited institutional review is whether the mismanaged and costly municipal-owned entities (known as MoEs) should be closed and brought into the ambit of the core departments of the administration or merely restructured to work better. Either way this would affect thousands of service-facing workers and would need to be carefully reviewed so as to keep most, if not all, of these vulnerable workers as they are often working to support low-income households.
The issue with the municipal entities is that they have been poorly governed by underqualified cadres who have been deployed to the boards and then expected to oversee the organisational and financial management of these entities. These lines of accountability and other work processes need to be reviewed and reconsidered, while simultaneously remembering the core purpose of the administration is to provide basic services to residents and businesses.
The way forward
The City’s institutional review is urgently needed. The procurement process needs to hurry up with assigning experienced and competent consultants to finally review and analyse the structures and processes of the city and then propose ways to streamline functions, remove silos and inefficiencies, and ensure officials are placed where they should be and need to be.
The lack of consideration for the building (or rather development) of an increasingly competent and efficient administration may be sad, but new executives can often turn organisations around and so can great political principals who have the right political principles.
[Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannesburg_Skyline.jpg ]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend