SA needs its own Steve Hilton

A chap called Steve Hilton has caused an almighty ruckus over in England by suggesting that it might be a good idea to close the government's job centres for nine months - to see if anyone noticed.

Hilton is the British government's strategy guru. He comes up with big-picture strategies; he tests the water, flies kites and dreams up ways that the UK might be better run. When he is way off beam, Prime Minister David Cameron can simply shrug his shoulders and tell the media and the House of Commons: "Oh, that's just Steve being Steve; you know, thinking a bit too creatively again."

This was more or less the stance Downing Street's bigwigs were forced to adopt after the Financial Times got wind of the fact that Hilton had been putting it about that Britain could do without its job centres. What really got him noticed this time, though, was his suggestion that maternity leave was making it too difficult for small businesses in particular to employ women, and that their right to mooch around the house in their pyjamas for a few months on full pay, on the flimsy pretext that they were nursing a new and tender little life, might be abolished to boost the economy.

And when he questioned why the British prime minister should be bound by EU regulations on temporary employment, Cameron's top bureaucrat had to explain to Hilton that even the PM could be sent to chookie if he broke the law.

Here at home something not entirely dissimilar has been happening. Last week Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan rather bravely raised the issue of making it slightly easier for companies to employ young people.

We have now set ourselves the target of creating some five million jobs and I dearly hope and pray that these jobs will be created. But how do you make jobs in a private sector that is too scared to employ a bunch of underskilled layabouts with unrealistic expectations, whom they're not allowed to fire for minor infractions like not actually doing anything, in the hope some of them might actually turn out okay?

The public sector, on the other hand, has no such concerns. They can create jobs until the cows come home without expecting anyone to actually do anything.

Beeld newspaper has been running articles featuring photographs sent in by readers. The photos are taken by ordinary members of the public wandering into police stations in the early hours and finding police officers fast asleep, in the charge office, nogal.

In the last decade the national police force grew by more than 50% and, on top of that, goodness knows how many tens of thousands of jobs were created in metro police forces. There was a naïve expectation in the beginning that all of these new bobbies on the beat might do something about crime levels, but we have all now come to understand that it was really about job creation.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs and capitalists have to show some bang for their wage buck. But that's no concern of the unions. So we have the boss of the National Union of Mineworkers threatening that he's going to tell Daddy Zuma that Pravin's not playing fair and that he must be punished unless he changes his tune. (I have two children under the age of 10 and I hear this kind of talk all the time.)

And then I read about Steve Hilton and I think; maybe this guy's on to something. What if we got some philanthropist to send the leadership of Cosatu and its affiliates to Mauritius on an all-expenses-paid beach-party knees-up for nine months to see if anyone notices? (Maybe they could call it a "fact-finding mission".) Would South Africa be brought to its knees if we had to live without things like the Small Enterprise Development Agency, the South African Municipal Workers' Union or, say, the Department of Public Works for the better part of a year?

One thing I admire about Hilton: he shares my views on collars, ties and suits. He rides his bike to work in shorts and a T-shirt and apparently walks around Downing Street with his shoes off. (Although even I would admit the latter is going a bit far, I am happy to report this latest contribution to the nation's intellectual discourse was conceived, penned and executed entirely in a pair of jeans and a faded T-shirt containing precisely four holes.)