Towards one policy agenda
The GNU has one policy agenda within its grasp. The first draft just needs a good edit and better alignment to the impending Budget.
Many people have been asking me how my ‘Six E’ policy priorities compare with the GNU agreement. In short, there are significant overlaps. My ideas under each E are in line with the overall GNU policy.
The big difference is, of course, that my list is (1) a lot shorter; (2) a lot more focused. It list of key things that must be started and done as soon as possible. It conveniently ignores a whole host of other things a government needs to during its term, like (awkward cough) foreign policy.
For a real comprehensive plan, you need to take a systems view on how to run a country. The GNU agreement does this. Indeed, it is actually a version of the nine medium-term strategic framework (MTSF) priorities. The what?
Ok, let’s start at the beginning.
The country is run on five-year plans (gasps from the back). The idea is that every five years, after an election, the incoming new Administration sets out its strategic objectives for its term. For planning purposes, this five-year plan is converted into a three-year plan, to match the three-year budget cycle.
Every October, in Medium Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), the Minister of Finance sets out a three-year spending framework (known as the medium term expenditure framework, or MTEF) that is aligned to the three-year medium term strategic framework (MTSF). During June/July (i.e., like right now), the Treasury puts out medium term spending guidelines which guide departments in their application for new funds. They do this through running Medium Term Expenditure Committees (MTEC).
So, yes, there you have it: after concluding MTECs, the MTBPS sets out the revised MTEF to achieve the MTSF.
(In English: the October three-year budget aligns three-year spending to three-year priorities that fold into the five-year goals of the Administration.)
It is analogous to a company setting out a strategic vision and then having a budget that flows from it. If used correctly, it a great way to run the country. Here is a great diagram summarising it all. You can diagnose problems, decide what you want to prioritise and fix, drop the sh1t that’s not working, run expenditure reviews. Rinse. Repeat. This is how it is supposed to work and an evaluation of whether it did or not.
The first Zuma administration made one big change to the system. That was to separate planning, monitoring and evaluation from budgeting.
In theory, the idea had its merits. A strong central planning, monitoring and evaluation function housed under the President would be able to better run performance monitoring. The Policy, Coordination and Advisory Services team during the Mandela and Mbeki years had done a great job of trying to get the whole show to aim in the same direction and perhaps this was the natural next step.
Zuma created a fully fledged government department, the dully named Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation. But two things went (in my personal view) wrong.
First, the performance monitoring process and the budgeting process became increasingly separate. It did not help that the Treasury was suspicious of any attempts by the Zuma administration to take over the Budget. Treasury jealously guarded the Budget process, and saw (and still sees) planning and budgeting as inextricably linked.
Budgets are great ways of creating priorities, and spending against budgets is the first line of defence when doing monitoring and evaluation. It creates a beautiful integrated cycle of problem diagnosis → solution → budget → spending → spending tracking → auditing. Rinse. Repeat.
Second, it became a nightmare bureaucracy. The 2019 Medium Term Strategic Framework, i.e. the ‘priorities’, is two hundred and sixty four pages long. 264. It is here if you are interested.
There are 7 priorities, 81 outcomes, 357 interventions and and 561 indicators. And the priorities are not really priorities. They are more fluffy vision statements than priorities.
With so many indicators, it is difficult for the people at the centre to keep track of what is being spent against what.
And, of course, there is no budget attached to it. For that, you need to go to the Estimates of National Expenditure that the Treasury puts out on Budget Day and try and reconcile the 7 priorities, 81 outcomes, 357 interventions and and 561 indicators back to Budget line items in 30 government departments. It is not possible because almost by the design of dear Jacob Zuma, the Budget process is insulated from planning.
Ok, so what now?
The 2024 GNU agreement is basically a version of the 2019 Medium Term Strategic Plan. This makes sense in a perfectly run world, because you start where you ended.
But basically the Ninth (GNU) Administration has just agreed to do all the same things as the Eighth (ANC) Administration.
Also, there is no direct link to budgeted line items. You can derive some of these, for example - the item 11.4 with the fewest words, “lnvesting in people through education, skills development and affordable quality health care”, is basically the combined education, skills and health budget of around R750 billion.
GNU “Priorities”
11.1 Rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, the promotion of fixed capital investment and industrialization, job creation, transformation, livelihood support, land reform, infrastructure development, structural reforms and transformational change, fiscal sustainability, and the sustainable use of our national resources and endowments. Macro-economic management must support national development goals in a sustainable manner.
11.2 Creating a more just society by tackling poverty, spatial inequalities, food security and the high cost of living, providing a social safety net, improving access to and the quality of, basic services, and protecting workers' rights.
11.3 Stabilising local government, effective cooperative governance, the assignment of appropriate responsibilities to different spheres of government and review of the role of traditional leadership in the governance framework.
11.4 lnvesting in people through education, skills development and affordable quality health care.
11.5 Building state capacity and creating a professional, merit based, corruption-free and developmental public service. Restructuring and improving state-owned entities to meet national development goals.
11.6 Strengthening law enforcement agencies to address crime. corruption and gender-based violence, as well as strengthening national security capabilities.
11.7 Strengthening the effectiveness of Parliament in respect of its legislative and oversight functions.
11.8 Strengthening social cohesion, nation-building and democratic participation, and undertaking common programmes against racism, sexism, tribalism and other forms of intolerance.
11.9 Foreign policy based on human rights, constitutionalism, the national interest, solidarity, peaceful resolution of conflicts, to achieve the African Agenda 2063, South-South, North-South and African cooperation, multilateralism and a just, peaceful and equitable world.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that the DA agreed. In many ways, the agreement is just kicking for touch. It is the equivalent of saying: “We will start with the last Administration’s policy priorities.
All it needs is a good edit and a budget
But it needs a good edit. In the spirit of one government that works together, there are lessons from the Western Cape. It runs the exact same planning process and settled on an easy to communicate and understandable three priorities: Jobs, Safety and Wellbeing. These were the high-level MTSF guidelines. The Western Cape version of the MTSF is a short and sweet 25 pages with lots of clear diagrammes and you can flip through it here. The Western Cape has also run a process to align the Western Cape priorities to the Budget in such a way that it was possible to report to the political leadership on how the Budget aligned to the priority areas, and have difficult conversations about provincial mandates, prioritisation and approach.
(Full disclosure, I was head of the Western Cape Budget Office so I might be a bit biased…)
With that in mind… some editorial ideas:
Who is the audience? The bureaucracy is around 1.2 million people. This is the team that needs to be aligned around a compelling plan. Is the plan readable by the average nurse or average home affairs official or the average policeman? A easy to remember catchy set of high level priorities. Of course, you could aim for Six Es. Or you could make it a word. Actually anything. Just make it memorable.
Less tautology. Cut the repetition, remove the repeats, ditch the duplicates. This sentence is a triumph of repeating the same thing over and over: Rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, the promotion of fixed capital investment and industrialization, job creation, transformation, livelihood support, land reform, infrastructure development, structural reforms and transformational change. It is all the same thing.
More ‘how’. The vision ideas are not bad (I mean who can be against “Rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth” ), but like how exactly? (On this, I would start with electricity and state-owned entity reform.)
Better alignment with the Budget. I have been a Treasury official almost my entire career, and so I am the first to admit my biases… but still I do not quite understand why planning, monitoring and evaluation as a function is so far removed from the Treasury, particularly monitoring and evaluation. It is the Treasury constitutional mandate to have a big army that understands departmental budgets down to nearly the last cent. There are MTECs and spending reviews and policy meetings and robust thinking from all Treasury divisions on big policy questions, mainly with the usual Treasury mindset which is to how to squeeze more output from every rand. So surely, for the love of all things holy, why is the Treasury not in charge of budget monitoring and evaluation? (Yes, I am an ex-Treasury official). [I may have mentioned Treasury too many times in that paragraph].
TL/DR
In short, the process now is to develop a high-level five-year strategic plan that can build towards the three-year Budget and inform successive budget cycles. A concrete and limited set of indicators should be used to measure budget against outcomes.