African public administration today is mixed with elements of the old bureaucratic model continuing alongside the new public management (NPM). The increasing application of the NPM approach has placed public administration and management systems in the spotlight and raised a number of challenges. Among them are the relevance of policy importation and the availability of civil servants with the requisite competence to perform the very critical responsibilities of government that reforms introduce. Using the case of Mozambique, this article shows that implementation of public sector reforms has brought in its trail considerable gaps between reform strategies and the competences needed to execute them. Convinced that competences of public administrators are a vital prerequisite for the success of reforms, the government of Mozambique has instituted a series of training programmes to provide the kind of competences that would reflect the new demands and realities facing the public sector. Though it is too early to expect results, the article concludes that the technical, managerial and leadership skills of public administrators and managers are being improved through better training curricula than were provided in the past.

Points for practitioners

The structure, functions, and processes of public administration and management have undergone remarkable changes as a result of NPM approaches. But as new approaches are being introduced, government managers have found themselves trying very hard to manage using old skills. In almost every profession, new circumstances require the development of new, or a redefinition of existing, skills. Institutionalizing new training curricula to provide technical, managerial and leadership competence for government administrators has become imperative now more than ever before. The caveat is that building new competencies will not necessarily fix all the problems unless other structural problems such as remuneration, promotion and utilization of ex-trainees are also addressed.