Abstract:
After multi-party democracy replaced apartheid, the Government of South Africa formulated policies and legislations to aid the renewal of the governance and administrative systems of the country. Some of these new policies and legislations are the Public Finance Management Act (Act 1 of 1999), the Batho Pele Principles that are aimed at transforming service delivery in the public sector, the Supply Chain Management (SCM) Policy, and the White Paper on Policing. As well intentioned as these policies and legislations might be, there have still been many protests around the country condemning the poor service delivery in the public sector. The South African Police Service (SAPS) in particular has received its fair share of criticism. However, the SAPS has often blamed its perceived poor performance on inadequate resources despite the existence of a SCM policy that seeks to bring efficiency in the acquisition and deployment of resources for service delivery.
Therefore, this study delved into the internal structures of SAPS in the Northern Cape (NC) to ascertain if the SCM policy has been effective in addressing the logistics needs of the personnel (i.e. the internal stakeholders). If so, then internal service delivery has been effective. In addition, the study also gave SAPS NC the opportunity to assess the public’s satisfaction with its service delivery (i.e. external service delivery). A mixed methods approach was used. Upon surveying 176 personnel, a statistical analysis of the data revealed that the SCM policy has largely enhanced both internal and external service delivery. However, the biggest challenge to implementing the policy is staffing inadequacy, as revealed by follow-up focus group discussions. In fact, about 12 out of the 15 challenges identified are attributable to the human factor. On the theoretical front, the study confirmed that performance management does enhance the effect of SCM on service delivery.
In order to deal with the challenge of the human factor, SAPS has to take a second look at its recruitment and training policies to come up with a comprehensive strategy for improving the quality and quantity of its human resource for service delivery. In terms of theory development, it is recommended that a similar study be conducted to test the possibility that performance management is a moderating variable (rather than a mediating variable) in the model used for this study.
