Managing talent in the South African Public Service.

South Africa is in the midst of a skills crisis, with the former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka acknowledging that "nothing short of a skills revolution by a nation united will extricate us from the crisis we face." (1) The skills crisis is particularly disconcerting given the mammoth challenges of dealing with the legacies of unemployment, poverty and inequality left by apartheid. The role of the Public Service in addressing these challenges is brought into sharp focus under the auspices of a developmental state (a term defined below), given the Department of Public Service and Administration's (DPSA) twin responsibilities of improving service delivery and making and implementing employment policy.

The shortage of skills has been identified as a major hindrance to economic growth and creating jobs as means for alleviating the poverty of millions of South Africans. A recent review by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation noted that the emergence and persistence of extreme levels of unemployment, particularly for less-skilled and younger blacks in south Africa is one of the most disappointing aspects of the country's postapartheid economic performance. (2) The South African government has recognized the skills shortage as a binding constraint on economic growth. In its economic policy, the government states that the most difficult aspects of the legacy of apartheid to undo arise from the policy's deliberately segregated and unequal system of education and its irrational patterns of population settlement. Even though South Africa's gross domestic product is growing, it is evident that the country lacks sufficient numbers of smiled professionals, managers, and artisans and that the uneven quality of education for previously disadvantaged individuals remains. (3) There is a misalignment between the needs of a growing economy and the ability of the education and training system to provide the necessary quantity and quality of skilled workers. (4)

These unsympathetic labour market conditions of high unemployment and skills shortages provide the context for attracting skills to the South African Public Service and retaining them. This article provides an assessment of the capacity and skills requirements of the South African Public Service from the perspective of a developmental state, highlights some of the constraints on existing human resource management (HRM) practices, and emphasizes the importance of talent management as a complementary approach for practically finding workable solutions to managing the skills shortages in the Public Service. The article also presents an analysis of the current trends based on the authors' interactions and involvement in a number of HRM projects in the public sector. Due to relatively recent emergence of talent management, there are too few empirical HRM studies to draw conclusions and to identify areas for further research.

The Developmental State and the Transformation of the South African Public Service

The South African government has set a target of halving poverty and unemployment by the year 2014. (5) This is an ambitious goal given the country's legacies of economic stagnation and racially based poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. Until the mid-1990s, apartheid policies sought to exclude the black majority in South Africa from participating equally in all areas of society while perpetuating a strict racial hierarchy, with the greatest allocation of resources going to people of European descent and Africans receiving the least. (6)

Since 1994, when a democratically elected government came into power, a range of policies have been introduced to transform South African society by reorganizing politics, the economy, and society through democratic and highly participatory modes of governance. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was adopted in 1994 as the basis for bringing about this transformation through government-funded infrastructure development. (7) Government, through the implementation of the RDP, set a number of goals to develop strong and stable democratic institutions and practices characterized by representativeness and participation; to become a fully democratic and nonracial society; to embark on a sustainable and environmentally friendly growth and development path; and to address the moral and ethical development of society. The implementation of the RDP brought about stability and moderate annual economic growth of about 3% during the period between 1994 and 1996.

The RDP was replaced by the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) Macroeconomic Strategy in 1996. The strategy had a much greater focus on achieving macroeconomic stabilization and economic growth by lowering the country's budget deficit and reducing inflation and redistributing economic resources by creating employment opportunities. GEAR aimed at achieving annual economic growth rate of 6% by 2000. A more central role for the private sector was envisaged in GEAR through increased investment and manufacturing-led export growth. The predicted rate of economic growth and job creation per annum never materialized, although the economy performed reasonably well in an unstable international environment, averaging about 2.8% per year from 1996 to 2000, while employment continued to fall or stagnate in the latter half of the 1990s. (8)

According to Bhorat, "A shift in the policy stance towards government having a more direct role in promoting economic expansion" has taken place in South Africa in the post-GEAR period. (9) This shift is evident in the implementation of a host of microeconomic strategies aimed at improving people's skills, increasing public sector efficiency, and removing constraints to business development. These efforts arise from the theory that increased government expenditures on social and economic infrastructures will encourage private economic investments. The Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa launched in 2006 as the latest policy framework for pursuing economic growth and development, emphasizes the importance of publicly funded infrastructure projects as a key to improving the productive capacity and the future growth potential of the economy.

The increasing role of the state in addressing the challenges of poverty and inequality in South Africa should be viewed in the context of government's conception of the role of the state as developmental. A developmental state, according to then-minister of finance Trevor Manua in 2004, is one "that was determined to influence the direction and pace of economic development by directly intervening in the development process, rather than relying on the uncoordinated influence of market forces to allocate resources." The developmental state of South Africa, then, took it upon itself the task of establishing substantive social and economic goals to guide the process of development and social mobilization. (10) This conception of the state as developmental locates the national government at the forefront of directing social and economic development policy and implementation. Former President Thabo Mbeki recognized as early as 2005 that there was a need to "massively improve the management, organizational, technical and other capacities of government" so that it meets its objectives. At that time, Mbeki called for "a thorough review of the functioning of the government system as a whole," to develop proposals on "improving the skills and competence within the Public Service, alignment of planning and implementation, and issues pertaining to the mobilization of the Public Service to speed up social transformation." (11)

Fulfilment of its envisaged role places enormous pressure on the Public Service, a key component of the state machinery in South Africa. It assumes that the Public Service has the capacity to meet this obligation, both in terms of effective strategic policymaking and delivering and expanding essential and basic services. However, the shortages of appropriately skilled people at all levels of the Public Service inevitably negatively impact the effectiveness and efficiency with which the national government supports and enables social and economic development.

Concerted efforts have been underway to transform the Public Service and build its capacity to deliver in accordance with the expectations of a developmental state. Three phases characterize this process of transformation: rationalization and policy development; modernization and implementation; and accelerated delivery. (12) These phases have not been sequential, as activities have often moved back and forth through the phases at different times, with government engaging simultaneously in policy formation, elaboration of legislation, and implementation. In the first phase, the legal apparatus of the apartheid state was replaced by policies and laws that are consistent with the values, rights, and obligations enshrined in the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. In this phase, key undertakings in the Public Service were to amalgamate previous homeland administrations and racially segregated departments and to start addressing the inherited and profound racial and gender biases and imbalances, particularly at the management level of the DPSA.

In the second phase, the benefits of fiscal discipline were starting to bear fruit, as the government sought to foster the conditions for sustainable economic growth and create more opportunities for employment while competing in global markets and intensifying the fight against poverty by improving the social security net and expanding the social wage. In the third phase the emphasis has been on accelerating service delivery. A cornerstone of the transformation processes has been a focus on improving the conditions and practices for HRM as a vehicle for developing Public Service capacity.

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