A week ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa gave his State of the Nation Address in which, among other things, he outlined the plans of government for the future.
One of the things that he mentioned was the appointment of a “red tape team” that would be tasked with eradicating the red tape that is impeding on the ability of companies to do business in SA.
This move was welcomed by businesses and other political parties as “progressive”. It is, in fact, one of the most troubling things about Ramaphosa’s presidency and it begs for reflection.
There's something called institutional fundamentalism. It refers to the creation of institutions as a means of resolving problems arising from, embedded in or occurring as a result of institutions.
Ramaphosa is evidently a proponent of institutional fundamentalism as he has been doing this for years, with little regard for how it is effectively undermining the state and its role in building better communities.
Ramaphosa diagnoses, often correctly, problems confronting our country. These problems are both structural and institutional. His approach to dealing with the problems is to create more institutions or platforms to duplicate the work that these state institutions are mandated to do, and to use private sector bigwigs for the job. An example can be gleaned in the recent SONA.
He argues, correctly, that there is a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy impeding on the ease of doing business in SA. This is evidently a failure of the department of trade and industry (DTI). To deal with this institutional problem, he appoints a “red tape team”, led by businessman Sipho Nkosi, to do the work that is supposed to be done by the DTI.
Ramaphosa has done it with many other state functions: investment teams, infrastructure teams, tourism envoys etc. All these are functions of government departments and related entities.
Attracting tourism is the mandate of the department of tourism and its entities, but he saw it fit to bring in private sector people to do this work.
If the problem is that there's no capacity in public institutions, then they must be capacitated. Creating a parallel structure or institution to deal with institutional failure is regressive.
More than this, it emasculates government departments, deepening the incapacity crisis that they face. And it is costly, because budgets are then created for those parallel structures and institutions — with the money of taxpayers.
The same way that we are today reeling from the effects of the looting that occurred under the Jacob Zuma presidency is how, years from now, we're going to be reeling from what is effectively the creation of a parallel but private-public sector. Ramaphosa is weakening government further.
He is outsourcing the role of directors-general, deputy directors-general, ministers and their advisers, as well as deputy ministers, to individuals.
Troublingly, these individuals are all then employed in the presidency to advise him, which begs the question: Are ministers in his own cabinet not supposed to be doing that job? If so, why is their work being duplicated? Does he not trust his own cabinet?
In all tiers of government, the private sector is milking the state due to function duplication. This happens even at local government where service delivery functions are being outsourced, resulting in a public servants being rendered redundant.
Institutional fundamentalism, on the surface, may seem like it is about capacitating the state. In reality, it is emasculating and strangling it to death. The government must build the capacity of the public service, not outsource its responsibilities to individuals in Ramaphosa’s office. This regressive approach is going to lead us down a very dangerous path.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.