| Abstrakt: |
The essence of a healthy state demands the establishment and maintenance of a professional public service. From this perception, questions such as appropriate structure and competent and responsive incumbents of such structures often arise. This article explores the need to ensure that senior public officials, in particular, meet the requirements of professionalism. The challenge is predominant within the management and leadership cadres of the public sector, which should ensure that the state is indeed meeting its strategic developmental goals and objectives, and that such effect is filtered down to all the spheres of government. This article explores and critically reflects on the post-1994 history of training and development of a new and emerging cadre of senior public officials in South Africa - and the contextual factors that impacted on this challenge. It focuses on the evaluation of institutional arrangements for the delivery of education and training programmes for this purpose, and provides reasons for the general sense that these institutions and programmes have failed to produce a professional senior public service. The pursuit of a Public Governance and Leadership model in favour of deficient Public Administration and Management models is proposed. In addition, the author explains why there needs to be holistic plans in place to ensure professionalisation of the senior public service and proposes requirements for a significant improvement in competent, ethical and performancedirected leadership qualities - that would ultimately lead to improved service delivery to the South African public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
