President Cyril Ramaphosa can learn a lot from football bosses.
The sport puts a high premium on performance and club managers/coaches are under tremendous pressure to perform or go. Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who owns English football club Chelsea, is notoriously impatient with underperforming managers.
He recently stunned the world when he relieved English blue-eyed boy Frank Lampard of his managerial duties late in January.
An assessment of Lampard’s track record this season is indicative of the rashness of club owners when it comes to producing results. He had a 17-game unbeaten run between September and December, and pundits even talked up the team as early title contenders. That was followed by eight losses and two wins, dropping his team to ninth place on the British premier league table. Not a bad return in any other setting, but not in football, especially when you spend £300m (about R6bn) on new players, as Lampard was allowed to.
Such high expectations play themselves out in football teams around the world.
Managers who keep their jobs longer are those who recruit the right players, refresh their teams, tactics and approach to the game.
OK, politics is not football. There are different dynamics at play in the political realm and leaders must take these into account when making key decisions.
Though I can’t help but look at Ramaphosa’s executive team with football eyes.
Ramaphosa FC would long have been relegated from the professional leagues with these levels of lethargy, incompetence, underperformance and indifference.
Ramaphosa FC would long have been relegated from the professional leagues with these levels of lethargy, incompetence, underperformance and indifference.
For starters, it is an oversized executive. A football team keeps a tight squad that allows for rotation when players are underperforming, injured or not available for no reason. Excess players who do not make the grade are placed on the transfer list and sold to other teams, or loaned out to regain their form elsewhere. This also helps keep the wage bill down.
Ramaphosa’s executive consists of 28 ministers and 34 deputy ministers. At annual salaries of R2.4m per minister and just more than R2m per deputy, his team is oversized and overpaid, but this doesn’t show in the results.
Remember that this figure excludes the upkeep of their ministerial houses in Cape Town and Pretoria, vehicles in both cities, travel costs, staff complements of between 10 and 15 per private office, and other frills. Aggregate all these costs over a five-year period and the figure is astronomical.
Deputy ministers are an unnecessary layer that should be done away with. They are expensive figureheads without any power. They do not sit in cabinet and if a minister is away, another minister acts in their place because deputies have no power to execute cabinet mandates. The position of deputy minister only exists to pacify ANC factions and provinces. Sometimes when provinces are tired of certain leaders they send them to parliament at the next elections so they can make deputy minister and at least keep their blue-light privileges. How long will the ANC keep playing patronage politics with the fiscus?
Among the deputy ministers on a free ride are gems such as David Mahlobo who allegedly used the spy slush fund as a personal piggy bank for former president Jacob Zuma, and Dikeledi Magadzi, who told the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture on Monday that she would always put the party first, even if its decisions were wrong.
“I did not go to parliament of my own accord, I went to parliament representing the ANC. Knowing what I know, I still believe what the party had instructed us to do was correct,” she said of an ANC caucus decision in 2016 to oppose an investigation into allegations the Guptas interfered in a R51bn tender at rail agency Prasa. Magadzi was chair of the transport portfolio committee.
It’s not just deputy ministers who must be placed on wholesale transfer; useless ministers have to be relegated to the back benches of parliament. There are some who are past their sell-by dates, who should retire to spend more time with their families. Others are simply out of their depth.
Ramaphosa needs nimble-footed ministers with fresh ideas and a go-getter approach to their work. He is overdue a cabinet reshuffle. Talented people such as David Masondo and Buti Manamela are not getting any younger. There’s no reason they should remain deputy ministers. When it comes to his team, the president must start thinking more like a football executive.
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