The Speakers Forum, an organisation of Speakers and Deputy Speakers of the National Assembly and all the provincial legislatures, as well as the Chairperson and the Deputy Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), held its last meeting in this year to consider a range of issues from its endeavour to solidify effective governance, sound administration, efficient oversight and accountable public participation models.
High on the agenda was the presentation of the Review of the Remuneration of Public Office-Bearers in the Executive and legislative Sector by the 21st Century Consultants, remuneration specialists, who were commissioned by the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office Bearers to conduct a study on it.
That arose from a realisation that there is no standardised methodology that determine the remuneration of office bearers at the legislatures.
The representative of 21st Century Consultancy Consultancy, Dr Mark Bussan, said “the benchmarking of profiles and grading of jobs of presiding officers of legislatures was to ensure that they are remunerated fairly in relation to their respective roles”.
According to him, the good news is that the updated job descriptions are now available and there is a repository of 35 jobs which are now graded. He said what came out of the study is that a fundamental principle should be adopted that “there should be no disparities in remuneration in relation to whether a Speaker that presides over a bigger or smaller province.
Furthermore, he said because there is no difference in their job description and they both charged with the tasks that are prescribed by the Constitution. As such, “their jobs should be seen as equally harder and complex”.
Most of all, Dr Bussan said, the remuneration benchmarking now seeks to consider the office bearers’ s terms of office for the purposes of taking into consideration the length of service of each office bearer and contribution to the sector. He though admitted that” more work still needs to be done in this regard to deal with the existing disparities.
The remuneration anchor positions of the President, Deputy President, Speaker and Deputy Speaker and the Chief Justice were kept unchanged by this study. He said the reason is that “the benchmarking of the correlation between the four was kept because it’s a globally acceptable remuneration benchmark that we should not temper with”.
But, he said, it was not left unchallenged, stating that there should be no remuneration disparities between the Speaker of the National Assembly and of the Provincial Legislature.
A contestation on this ensued, however the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Lechesa Tsenoli, suggested that there should be a working group that would deal with that issue to ensure that the existing anomalies in this regard are dealt with.
It was agreed that the working group should relay its resolutions to the commission so that they can inform the basis of its remuneration configurations of office bearers and profiling and grading thereof as some of the matters raised would not necessarily be resolved now.
The need for further deliberations and engagements beyond this space was reiterated and the outcomes of the deliberations, it was argued, will clarify the reasoning regarding the current remuneration profiles and grading of office bearers at national and provincial levels. According to the projections of the study, the entire process of remuneration adjustment will cost the national treasury approximately R 93 million.
In his concluding remarks, the chairperson of the session, the Chairperson of the National Council of Provinces, Mr Amos Masondo, emphasised that the views expressed by various office bearers will go a long way in addressing the existing remuneration disparities in the sector. Legislatures, he said, must collate their suggestions and send them to the commission. “We can’t emphasise that enough because the considerations of the collective need to be taken into account,” he said.
Adding to that, Mr Tsenoli urged the provincial speakers and their Chief Financial Officers to look at these issues that are complicating the report. “Do it including the outstanding issue of job descriptions. Lets agree to do that by the end of next week. So that the commission can do its work accurately,” added Mr Tsenoli.
By Abel Mputing
5 December 2019
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