A few years ago, when President Cyril Ramaphosa’s clarion call to nonpolitical actors to participate in fixing the state — the “Thuma Mina” campaign — was in full bloom, a few individuals and structures took up arms to respond.
Those who had been sidelined or jettisoned out of jobs during the more chaotic periods of the latter days of the Zuma administration were approached and asked to make contributions towards fixing the state.
Big business, which had marshalled troops to call for #ZumaMustGo, quietly assembled and re-engaged with the state and formed alliances and collaborations such as the National Energy Crisis Committee. When the Covid pandemic struck, they took the lead in supporting the Solidarity Fund.
Critical public institutions that had been decimated from within — the Passenger Rail Agency of SA, the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), Eskom, the SA Revenue Service (Sars), Denel and many others — were granted new leases on life as committed individuals and concerned patriots decided to play whatever roles they could.
However, addressing the rot in some of those institutions required far more than the spirit of patriots. Commissions of inquiry into the PIC and Sars provided an opportunity to address the sins of past leadership and heal the scars of broken professionals. As more was uncovered it became clear that a key contributor to the chaos had really been broken governance and accountability models.
The Nugent and Mpati commissions made recommendations on how to heal from the past and future-proof the institutions. Beyond the diagnosis, both institutions found capable leaders and were able to maintain some stability, where contracts of CEOs actually lasted the full term.
While all that was to be welcomed, a couple of key issues remained unresolved and are now emerging as potential reversal triggers. The Sars succession model has simply not kicked in, and at a time when the current commissioner, Edward Kieswetter, should have exited the high office, his term was extended simply because no-one was ready to step up.
How such a glaring gap had not been picked up on time remains unclear, but it indicates that the canvas of future-proofing the institution was incomplete. After all, those with some memory will recall it was in the interregnum between the end of the Pravin Gordhan era and the beginning of Tom Moyane’s catastrophic term where leadership instability created the opening for the chaos that ensued.
At the PIC the most contentious of the Mpati commission’s recommendations — insulating it from overt political influence by abolishing the practice of appointing a deputy finance minister as board chair — was ignored. In recent days the most critical posts — CEO and CIO — have been subjected to a planned and attritional shuffle.
Patrick Dlamini replaced Abel Sithole as CEO in what seemed to be an orderly process. The board succession was bungled, though, with the wrong board member announced to the public and the depth of expertise in the new board called into question.
Then the CIO was suspended amid murky allegations, and we all started wondering whether the PIC was once again regressing to the chaos of yesterday while at a fragile transition stage. While one hopes that isn’t the case, it is important to note that given the work it takes to fix such institutions, any element of regression will be fatal for the progress already made.
SA’s recent removal from the Financial Action Task Force’s greylist is a case in point. Maintaining enough vigilance to ensure we never fall into crisis again is the most important challenge. We can only hope that we have learnt from the case studies of recent years.
• Sithole (@coruscakhaya) is an accountant, academic and activist.
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