JUSTICE MALALA | Overpaid, underperforming civil servants must be dropped or fired

Every day in South Africa is a reminder that the house is on fire and our leaders have destroyed the fire hydrants. Two events last week underlined the deep rut we find ourselves in.

First, minister of finance Enoch Godongwana told us that we are broke but the government will do little or nothing to stop wanton spending or try to raise money except by borrowing more. Second, Ngizwe Mchunu, a loud-mouthed Jacob Zuma supporter and former radio deejay who was charged with inciting some of the violence of the July 2021 riots, was acquitted of all charges on Friday. Mchunu’s acquittal is not interesting in itself, but it does raise the question: where are the masterminds of the “insurrection” (to quote President Cyril Ramaphosa) of those events which led to the deaths of 354 people?

Godongwana’s mini-budget and Mchunu’s acquittal illustrate, again, the distressing lack of leadership and haste in our government. That lack of leadership was even more stark due to the fact that as Godongwana spoke, the Boks were in Pretoria on their victory tour, with their captain Siya Kolisi underlining the importance of leadership, single-mindedness, action, unity and resilience for a team or nation to overcome its challenges.

In the case of Godongwana, he and the president had a clear duty: we are spending too much on civil servants, so you need to rein in their unsustainable, above-inflation, annual increases. He did not lift a finger to do so. Where is government money going to come from? We don’t know because he did not do the brave thing and announce tax increases. Faced with a decision, he and the president caved in to their trade union allies’ pressure to keep paying our very much uncivil servants.

In its latest report, titled “A Country in Crisis: First steps towards a growth strategy”, the Centre for Development Enterprise makes a very important point: “To get to a point where we can expect these changes (that would stem SA’s economic decline) to be urgently and effectively implemented, we need not just a new leadership team but a new way of leading.”

In the Bok squad, if your performance is below par, you are either benched or you don’t get called at all. In the ANC, the party encourages and endorses the placement of talentless, unskilled, individuals in crucial positions.

Ramaphosa would do well to heed that last bit. His style, whereby he works within the party and embraces the likes of Zuma and does not alienate anyone, has yielded a puny harvest. He needs to go direct, but he won’t. If he was going to, he would have benched his police minister and a few others in his security cluster because, seriously, where are the arrests, charges and trials of the July 2021 masterminds?

The president and his cabinet have been front and centre in the Bok celebrations of the past week. Someone should tell them that it is patently wrong to invoke the successes of the Boks, while not reflecting on why those successes came about. For example, imagine if a Springbok was implicated in wrongdoing and consorting with the enemy to the deep detriment of his team. Would they be retained? I doubt it. Yet, just weeks ago, the man who was appointed by Jacob Zuma and the Gupta family as finance minister in December 2015, Des van Rooyen, was deployed as a board member of one of Gauteng’s most important finance institutions.

In the Bok squad, if your performance is below par, you are either benched or you don’t get called at all. In the ANC, the party encourages and endorses the placement of talentless, unskilled, individuals in crucial positions. Take the City of Joburg. In its quest for power and largesse, the ANC in Joburg has twice worked with the EFF and unscrupulous minor parties to put two of the most hopeless politicians from a 0.5% party in the mayoralty. The results are there for all to see: Joburg is becoming more of a mess by the hour. You can stand on a street corner in the Joburg CBD and witness the city collapsing in real time — a metro cop collecting bribes with impunity in broad daylight, a bin overflowing with rubbish, a man urinating in an alleyway — while its leadership puts the squeeze on residents.

Ramaphosa and his cabinet hardly ever acknowledge or show, by word or deed, that SA is a house on fire. In the last three games that the Springboks played, they came under immense pressure and it seemed as if they would lose. Think back on the pressure piled on by the All Blacks in the last 10 minutes of the final. The bench was shouting out strategies and changing tactics and players to contain the assault. In SA today, with possibly the world’s highest unemployment rate, Ramaphosa and his team are proceeding as if we have the unemployment rate of Japan (2.6%). Author Stieg Larsson described one of his characters thus: “He’s pulling the load of an ox and walking on eggshells.”

For a long time the nation was rooting for Ramaphosa and the ANC to be like Siya Kolisi and crush the eggshells. It’s not happening.