23 Jun 2014

The Deputy Permanent Secretary to the President, Ms Botshelo Mathuba says there is need for a speedy response and quality service as citizens and investors demand improved public service delivery.

“Our customers are able to differentiate between average and outstanding service and for them good service is not good enough. They demand the best from us,” Ms Mathuba advised.

In her welcome remarks at this year’s Public Service Awards ceremony in Gaborone on June 20 she said government, citizens, and investors, were equally concerned about the public service performance.

She said the concern was due to the fact that the public service provided a wide range of essential public services that assured customers of economic and social security.

“As we perform these public functions, we need to always remember that most of them are unavoidable. People have no choice; for example, passports, driver’s licenses, and birth certificates can only be gotten from the government,” she said.

Ms Mathuba said public officers were very important as they were the pillars of government, and, without them the government’s wealth would collapse.

She also reminded public officers that they were employed to perform public duties, adding that all other organisations depended on the quality of public officers. Ms Mathuba said both strategy and hard work were very important for the improvement of the public service performance.

“You are all aware that the implementation of our plans and programmes is a big challenge in the public service. Once our goals are set, everything we do from there on is either moving us towards or away from them. So, it is therefore necessary to always keep our hands on the steering wheel,” she said.

Ms Mathuba also said the focus, time, innovation, commitment and passion mattered a lot, adding that workers must also eliminate bad habits from the workplace as there was also a concern of poor work ethics. ‘We have to monitor performance and conduct performance reviews,” she added. 

Performance reviews, Ms Mathuba said, gave supervisors an opportunity to give employees feedback, which is information about employees’ past performance in the expectation that it would improve future performance of officers. 

Therefore the information should be very specific so that officers understood what it was all about, she said, adding that it was the responsibility of all supervisors to coach and motivate subbordinates so that government could make the best out of them. 

Motivation and performance, Ms Mathuba said would drop even with the best employees if they were not given the encouragement they needed to continue delivering. 

To achieve the desired results, she said both supervisors and employees should have an interest in the people they work with and derive satisfaction from working with them.

She congratulated all awards recipients for their outstanding performance and encouraged them to continue working hard. She said if the whole public service could emulate them, Botswana would prosper. 

“As we recognise, appreciate and celebrate their performance, I believe that those of you who work with them and those who have received service from them will agree that they indeed deserve these awards,” she said.

She said she had watched with great interest the talent that the public service day had unearthed from within the public service over the past few days. 

Therefore, she expressed hope that the recognition given to the many talents that were displayed by the public service employees who participated in all the public service day activities would go a long way in revitalising and motivating all public servants to give the public their best. ENDS