In his very first state of the nation address in early 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa promised to slim down the cabinet and make government more efficient.
Five years later, in March, he added two new ministers to his cabinet, increasing the number of ministries to 30. This makes SA’s cabinet one of the world’s largest. Some of the world’s biggest economies, the US and Germany among them, have cabinets hardly half the size of ours. And that’s not even counting SA’s 36 deputy ministers.
In this year’s state of the nation address, Ramaphosa told us, somewhat unconvincingly, that he was still committed to reducing the size of government, revealing that he had asked the Treasury and the presidency for proposals.
Leaked documents from the Treasury’s recent meeting with the cabinet at the Spier wine estate have brought those proposals dramatically into the open. They are bold and far-reaching. The government embarked on efforts to try to curb spending and stabilise the public debt more than a decade ago. But this is the first time that we know of that the Treasury has gone as far as to tackle the structure of the state itself in its cost-cutting proposals. And the proposals demonstrate just how cluttered and bloated the state actually is, and how badly it is in need of trimming.
The Treasury set clear criteria to determine whether departments and entities should be closed or merged into others, including whether functions are duplicated or closely related, and whether mandates are being fulfilled (or even exist). And it took the knife accordingly.
For some ministries it recommended mergers — the tourism and small business departments should be folded into the department of trade, industry & competition, for example; the department of planning, monitoring & evaluation should be part of public service & administration, while sport, arts & culture fits easily into basic education.
For others, it recommended they have no need to exist at all — the Treasury and relevant ministries should be doing what public enterprises does, while the government communication and information system (GCIS) should simply be a division of the presidency. It also recommended that many of the host of public entities that the government has spawned, at great cost, should simply be absorbed into the relevant departments — the Road Traffic Management Corporation into transport and the National Development Agency into social development.
Equally, it suggested that some of the many government agencies would make more sense if consolidated, for example, the credit and consumer regulators.
It doesn’t quite go as far as to suggest that there’s really no need for an electricity minister, and it avoids a couple of other sacred cows. But the list itself, and the extent of the duplication and wastage it outlines, is a rebuke to Ramaphosa, who has proliferated ministries and functions despite promises to trim government.
Whether anyone in the government has the appetite to implement these proposals is the big question. All these ministries have provided crucial opportunities to keep party loyalists happy and smooth over divisions in the governing party at a tough time for the Ramaphosa administration. They all support a host of people and service providers. So too do all the many public entities with their highly paid executives, fancy offices and large staffs.
There are billions of rand to be gained in cost cuts by the “reconfiguration of the state” that the Treasury has proposed. However, any merger or closure will be fiercely contested. Implementation is uncertain. But at least the Treasury has put the issues firmly on the table.
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