DPSM to cure public service laziness
Larona Makhaiza | Monday October 16, 2023 06:00
Speaking this week during a media briefing, Macholo was quick to express that she is not impressed at all with service delivery from civil servants. Few months ago, President Mokgweetsi Masisi launched the mindset change, campaign aimed at driving transformation and fostering a collective shift in attitudes and perspectives. Through mindset change Batswana are also implored to be efficient in their everyday duties, which is what Macholo is gunning for.
Last year’s results of Botswana’s Workforce study stated stated that 70% of the staff DPSM is underutilized while 23 % is utilized and only 7% is over utilized. Macholo also said that she would like to her subordinates to focus more on work ethics as they embark on the government’s mindset change campaign.
"Even public servants themselves know that when they go to find service from other ministries they will not get what they want and this is a position that we do not really want to be at,” bemoaned Macholo. She highlighted that one of the most flaws in service delivery from DPSM and other government branches is moving at a tortoise pace by the employees in their work. “Laziness is really the core of what the people are not happy about in our service delivery and this is one of the things that we will be talking about. We will find ways and what we can do about this because it’s us that work at a low pace,” she said.
To add more on factors that impede service delivery, the director stated that some of the employees are qualified but do not have the experience to do the job. “The public service has a lot of educated people so we are not without intelligence but in some cases we are without enough experiences on what we want to do and what we do not want to do,” pointed out Macholo.
But the director holds a great belief that the mindset change strategy by the President will be the right solution to ameliorate issues of service delivery in the country. “My impression and what I know is that it is possible to do things quickly so we just have to be willing to do so and the mindset change around the processes that we believe is not working for us. We must change those processes,” Macholo said confidently.
To improve on the efficiency, the director pointed out that they are doing away with paper as they embark on digitalization, which will expedite service delivery. “We want to go digital and implement things like e-pay slip where employees registered would receive pay slip by email. This will also extend to absence management (leave) being migrated to digitalized form with DPSM undertaking a portal development through GovOnline Hack-a-thons for the easy dissemination of Human Resource services,” Macholo said.
Asked to comment on Macholo's assertion that there are some lazy public servants in the civil service, the Secretary General (SG) of the Botswana Sector of Educators Trade Union (BOSETU) Tobokani Rari said Director Macholo’s statement is uncalled for when she insinuated that public and civil servants are lazy. “I think it is disrespectful to the public service if she says that they are lazy. That is being disrespectful to say the least,” Rari added.
He further argued that if some civil servants were not doing their job then they could have been fired from their jobs. “When you are employed, you’re given a job description and people get assessed and non delivery is a dismissable offence. If you fail to deliver your not supposed to be in the job,” stated Rari. The secretary general added that; “DPSM has failed dismally to manage performance and failed to set up a system that should hold the public service accountable,” he said. He warned the director to not generalize her statements.