‘HEALTHY’ PUBLIC ENTERPRISES - LESSONS FOR AND FROM SOUTH AFRICA? D. Gasper and R. Tangri Service Delivery Review: A Learning Journal For Public Managers, 2002(1): 25-28. Department of Public Service & Administration, Government of South Africa. How truly public are public (state-owned) enterprises? Why has their record in Africa been disappointing? How far can privatized enterprises be kept to a public agenda through regulation? What other options are there, including through public-private partnerships and to get reformed state-owned organizations that are both enterprising and public spirited? Will South Africa's public enterprise reforms offer a positive example for elsewhere in Africa? A group of thirty five to forty professionals, drawn equally from South Africa and outside, came to Cape Town for a two week workshop in September 2001 to study options and experiences in public enterprise reform, together with a range of resource persons. The non South African participants were African civil servants, managers and academics who had studied during the late 1980s or early 1990s at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, The Netherlands, and some ISS staff members. The South African participants included many from the Ministry of Public Enterprises (MPE) and the Department of Public Service and Administration, and others from JUPMET university departments and various private, public, governmental and parastatal organizations, including other alumni of ISS. 1 The workshop was jointly organized by the School of Public Management and Planning of the University of Stellenbosch, on behalf of JUPMET, and the ISS. When are public enterprises truly public? The meeting took as public enterprises (also referred to as state-owned enterprises) those with majority government ownership, engaged in the production and sale of goods and services. We excluded state sector activities such as education, health services, and road construction that are basically financed in other ways, usually from government’s general revenue, rather than by selling their outputs. Interestingly, people use the term ‘public’ to refer both to ‘the public sector’ and to its intended clients, ‘the public’. So ‘the public sector’ typically implies both state-owned and the goal of serving the public. The sector deserves the name ‘public’ if it is public-oriented, not just because it is state-owned. But public sector enterprises are not automatically public-oriented, warned Lucky Montana of MPE. Their service orientation can be weak, if government automatically covers deficits and there is high protection from competition or domination by partisan political agendas. A speaker from Telkom described the organization in 1994 as having ‘a real civil service attitude’; this was not a compliment. Similar complaints are voiced by some who have worked in parts of South Africa’s public sector in the years since. On the other hand, we see some truly public service oriented state sector organizations, as well as some privately owned organizations with strong orientation to serve the public and who do so effectively. The same applies for some NGOs and community based organizations, and we often have less hesitation including these under the term ‘public’. We also see