President Cyril Ramaphosa sought to resell his recent, long-awaited but underwhelming cabinet reshuffle on Monday, especially the increase of the size of cabinet ministries. As with the reshuffle, the explanation has yet to make a convincing case for the constant merging and demerging of ministries and departments that appear more designed to respond to the ANC’s political calculus than SA’s needs.
Ramaphosa came into power promising he would renew his party; and end sleaze as well as promote ethical governance and leadership. After his ascension to the Union Buildings he pledged to reconfigure the size and shape of government. The latter raised hopes that bloated ministries — the legacy of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma — would be trimmed considerably.
Yet in 2018, after ousting Zuma, Ramaphosa essentially continued with his cabinet, dropping only a few of his predecessor’s close allies who had been fingered in corruption allegations. In 2019 he reduced ministries from 34 to 28, but last week he raised the total to 30 again, putting paid to the idea that he is committed to trimming the cabinet.
He also raised the number of ministers in his office, most recently with the appointment of Kgosientsho “Sputla” Ramokgopa as electricity minister, bringing to four the ministers in the presidency.
Cleverly, Ramaphosa has stayed away from defending the merits of the appointments, not saying whether any of the minister(s) implicated in Eskom corruption allegations had made the cut in last week’s reshuffle.
Department scrapped
Faced with criticism that he is not committed to reducing the size of the cabinet he promised that the National Treasury and presidency would work with other government departments to reconfigure the appropriate size and form of government, but only during his second term. And he said this work would be informed by the needs of South Africans, narrowing the scope of this important debate.
The department of public enterprises, which his party wants to be discontinued, will therefore only be scrapped after the 2024 general elections. Ramaphosa confirmed this during his first appearance in parliament last week to answer mostly law-and-order questions from MPs.
A concern about the debate and the government’s general approach to this issue is the lack of detail, transparency and consultation about the process. The expansion of the presidency by adding more ministries, for example, has been accompanied by exponential growth in the number of advisers from outside government with unclear powers in relation to those of career civil servants.
This issue of so-called privatisation of governance was a source of much debate and resentment within the ANC in the run-up to its 55th national conference in December 2022. The case for this approach has yet to be adequately explained. This is not to suggest collaboration with the private sector is wrong; far from it, in its current weak state the government needs more co-operation with the private sector.
In what must worry those concerned with good governance, it emerged on Tuesday that Bejani Chauke, one of the president’s senior advisers, will leave this role but continue providing advice to the presidency without pay. Chauke is no ordinary adviser — he played a key role in the president’s first election as ANC leader at the party’s national conference in 2017.
More problems
At the ANC conference in 2022, Chauke ran for treasurer-general and lost to Gwen Ramokgopa, but made it to the party’s national executive committee. This contest occurred while the public protector, SA Revenue Service, Reserve Bank and Hawks were probing a robbery of about $500,000 from the president’s Phala Phala farm. Chauke was accused by former spy boss Arthur Fraser of covering it up and a criminal complaint was filed against the president.
Chauke’s stepping aside while continuing to provide free services to the president or his office may be a noble act, but it is likely to bring more problems than good for that office, something it can ill afford.
On Monday the president also confirmed that the government, acting on the advice of his State-Owned Enterprises (SOE) Advisory Council, will press ahead with the establishment of the SOE Holdings Company. Publicly available information is scant, apart from its function to oversee the governance of the seven major SOEs that now fall under the department of public enterprises, such as Eskom, Transnet and Denel. Policy direction will stay with the respective ministries.
Eskom — which is undergoing a costly, complex unbundling of its generation, distribution and transmission divisions, and the establishment of a holding company — will be a subsidiary of the SOE Holdings Company, as will Transnet and the Transnet National Ports Authority.
Again, there is nothing untoward about this old idea. After all, it has been implemented by other jurisdictions, including Singapore. But the separator between SA and Singapore is that the latter has zero tolerance for corruption and values meritocracy above party loyalty.
It is unclear whether the employees of the department of public enterprises will be transferred to the new holdings company, nor is it evident whether the new entity will tackle the critical problems facing SOEs: governance, leadership and capital structures.
These are just two of the major reorganisations the government is planning. The other, lesser known, is the rationalisation of the development finance institutions.
What makes this columnist nervous is whether the government has the ability to undertake such complex restructures — on time, within budget — when it openly admits to lacking capacity. Worse, it is common knowledge that the government’s track record in building new institutions is poor.
• Dludlu, a former Sowetan editor, is CEO of the Small Business Institute.
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