An alternative to AA as it currently stands

The IRR has come out pretty strongly against Affirmative Action (AA), highlighting the problems it has caused in terms of service delivery.

What it hasn’t done is come up with an alternative, so I got to thinking about what we could do differently as a country, and thus achieve the results we want.

First up we need to list our goals in their order of importance:

1. Maintaining the services we have
2. Expanding their reach
3. Transformation

Why do I set it out in this particular order? If you don’t maintain the services you have, expanding their reach ends up being pointless. It just becomes a treadmill, as you expand services to new areas they collapse in the old ones.

Transformation is in third place because when you get right down to it there is nothing empowering about living in sewage.

So how do we do this? First we need to fill the positions that are currently empty – even if the people we hire aren’t exactly the right population group.

Suspend AA and BEE as it stands – and just hire whoever is available with the understanding that training is part of their jobs.

This isn’t an ideal solution, because it delays the third priority a bit, but right now we have a service delivery crisis.

Second pick ministers based on their familiarity with their portfolios, rather than on the basis of their loyalty to the sitting president.

Eskom has competent people who understand the challenges faced by the national power grid. Rather than picking someone whose background is basically mismanaging our country’s fishing industry we could pick people who know about keeping the nation's lights on.

Sure that means we might take a person out of a position that is hard to fill, but that person probably knows who would be a suitable replacement better than anybody else.

Third institute a new AA and BEE policy centred around junior positions – and then institute a policy of promoting people from within the given departments to management.

In other words, hire more people from previously disadvantaged backgrounds in lower positions and promote them as they get a handle on what needs doing.

While this won’t do away with political favouritism, it will at least mean the favourites have some familiarity with what they are supposed to be doing having complained to their co-workers about the last person who was doing it.

Note that while we tend to be highly critical of our current police commissioner, we can’t honestly call Riah Phiyega worse than Jackie Selebi or Bheki Cele. She has benefited a bit from her background in social work.

Now imagine what an actual experienced cop could do with the job. Popcru is a Cosatu affiliate, the ANC could ask their advice on this and help patch up the alliance while they’re at it.

Fourth actively recruit people with relevant degrees from universities. We should not have chemical engineers struggling to find jobs and municipalities struggling with water quality – we need to use every resource we have available.

This actually is an important step towards empowerment – as one of our chief issues is the language gap. There are a lot of people in our country who are very capable and competent, who aren’t fluent enough in English to get a great job in the private sector. We shouldn’t be wasting their talents.

Further we are struggling with youth unemployment – and a focus on hiring in junior positions can help alleviate this problem. Our current tendency to look at empowerment as a mid to top tier issue ignores the fact that if your foundations are bad, if the very ground floor is unstable, well there goes your building.

Now obviously this is just me writing from the comfort of a news desk, that tends to warp one's perspective a bit – I am going to leave comments open here to see what you think we could do to achieve those goals.

How do you think we could do better on service delivery?