Improving Citizen Services through Digital Transformation in Local Government Post COVID-19: Voices of Graduates, South Africa

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and quickly spread across the world resulting in millions of deaths. The efforts to curtail the spread of the virus during the pandemic resulted in governments across the world pronouncing measures to restrict the movement of people, introducing curfews, instilling travel bans and encouraging people to stay at home. These unprecedented restrictions have resulted in the disruptions of the global economy. Faced with a global menace, the public sector in South Africa is slowly adopting ICT in its operations to improve service delivery. Despite a series of ICT innovative initiatives conducted by corporations during covid-19 environment, local government has been reluctant to adopt ICT in its operations. To understand the role of ICT in creating employment opportunities in the local government during the coronavirus pandemic a qualitative approach was adopted where twenty participants were interviewed. Participants comprised 10 key informants from the public sector and tertiary institutions in KwaZulu-Natal. The results showed that the public sector has failed to transform structurally in major areas to deal with a health crisis. Given the weak transformation of the South African economy due to COVID-19, high numbers of graduates entered the labour market, most of whom were shunning the public sector. To address graduate employability in the public sector, policymakers need to involve graduates in decisions that are attractive to them and use ICT to bring about stability in the public sector and make it an integral part of the well-being of graduates. The failure to integrate graduates into the public sector was found to be due to a lack of certain attributes, serious skills mismatch and a general lack of capacity. Therefore, the public sector should bridge this gap by adopting ICT to meet labour market needs and individual graduates’ attributes. Although the data in this work came from a small sample of key informants, it contributes significantly to expanding the scholarship on Digital Transformation in Local Government post-COVID-19. Keywords: Labour Market, Employment, Graduates, Perceptions, ICT.