The Director of Public Service Management Gaone Macholo has told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that the public service is facing a myriad of problems ranging from demoralised staff, theft under pretext of overtime, and prolonged acting and temporary engagements.
When appearing before the PAC on Tuesday morning, Macholo revealed that the DPSM has delegated all ministries to recruit staff for positions below D1 Scale, but ministries are struggling to fill vacancies because they lack recruitment expertise.
She added that there are many vacancies in the ministries of Health, and Education and Skills development but the ministries lack the expertise to recruit.
While she did not have a specific figure for all vacancies in the civil service, she estimated that the two ministries have around 3000 vacancies that need to be filled. “ We have a lot of vacancies, just under 2000 in the ministry of education, and then the other chunk of vacancies are at the ministry of health and those are focus areas, then followed by ministry of agriculture. That is where the vacancy rate is the highest and we are going to be working with them so that whatever it can take, they will fill these vacancies very urgently,” she said.
She said those acting in senior positions are unable to make decisions and this has had a serious impact on service delivery. In some instances, supervisors are reluctant to take action against non-performing staff, she said, attributing non-performance to a number of factors.
“It is a culture issue and also a competence issue. It is not really about people not doing their work, it is about part of how we were handling the public service growth, we were separating jobs and specializing them too much, such that now the job is too narrow. When you ask them to do more, they do not see that as part of their responsibility, even if what they do can be done in shortest time possible,” Macholo told the PAC. She said there is urgent need for workforce planning to remove those loopholes.
She said the civil service jobs need to be enriched and enlarged and that the civil service doesn’t need to be highly specialized as it is if it is to be efficient and able to satisfy its customer needs.
“In some areas where you know that this can be done by one person, you will see that we have employed four or five people. We need to change,” she said adding that they have a strategy in place to address majority of the prevailing challenges.
Macholo said people should not be acting for more than 12 months adding that some employees use overtime to steal public funds.
Before recent appointments of senior civil servants there were Acting Attorney General, Acting DPP, Acting Ombudsman, and Acting Director General DCEC.
Some of the major instabilities in the civil service
• Commissioner of Police has been acting since early 2022
• Botswana Speaks has no manpower
• Parliament committees not working due to shortage of manpower
• Nurses have stopped dispensing medicines in public facilities forcing MoH into overdrive in recruitment of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians
• Doctors are on go slow due to non-payment of emergency duty call allowance and other related working conditions, have approached Commissioner of Labour
• Close to a third of the number of teachers in public schools are temporary
• Some people have been holding acting positions for more than two years
• DIS agents are demanding better working conditions
• Teachers no longer doing ex
