Johannesburg – This week’s cabinet reshuffle is not going to improve governance.
It is important to understand the inherent limitations of a cabinet reshuffle.
The president will always pretend that the main point of a cabinet reshuffle is to improve governance.
That is because he has a duty to assess the performance of the ministers and, based on such assessment, would naturally choose from time to time to reshuffle.
In reality, however, party politics drive reshuffle dynamics.
The Minister of Police, Bheki Cele, has not been fired. That is a classic example of how cabinet reshuffles aren’t primarily about job performance. Cele is not fit for purpose.
He is failing to do his bit within the security cluster to keep us safe. In fact, many researchers and civil society organisations keeping tabs on policing tell us that the police are as much a threat to our safety as criminals.
The links between wayward cops and the criminal underworld, for example, is so potent that those leaders within the SAPS determined to root out this problem get sacked, bullied, and even murdered.
Look, for example, at the experiences of Major-General Jeremy Vearey, who had to go into hiding because the safety of his family is compromised just because of his work.
He is as much a threat to criminals as he is a threat to wayward police who are in cahoots with criminals.
Cele is utterly unimpressive as the political head in charge of policing.
I see no compelling reason why he wasn’t fired, other than his boss being scared of a wounded enemy.
Instead, the Ministry of Intelligence has been collapsed. That is a good decision despite hasty fears by some that this amounts to an over-concentration of power in the Presidency.
The restructuring gives better effect to section 109 in chapter 11 of the constitution.
It envisages the president as the main client of intelligent services.
This way, as citizens, we can also hold him directly accountable for what he does with the intelligence he has.
But leaving Cele in place shows that President Cyril Ramaphosa isn’t wholly motivated by optimising the performance of the security cluster.
Take a very different example: sports, arts and culture.
What has Minister Nathi Mthethwa truly done to develop sports, and to enable arts and culture to take its rightful place as a serious part of our economy?
Would anyone cry if he was fired? Of course not. He is useless.
Yet he too stays on.
The reason these folks are in government is because their appointments reflect political bargaining by constituencies within the ANC and the tripartite alliance.
And because of that reality, we end up with many ministers overstaying their welcome. South African citizens are at the mercy of the political power plays inside the ANC. The real problem with this government is that it refuses to focus on building an effective bureaucracy and setting in place job requirements for political heads that compel them to answer to the core business of the state.
If you do not make this switch, in terms of political accountability, then you will perpetually be saddled with a cabinet of political powerful people of very mixed abilities.
It would serve us better to focus on the state of the state.
Our state is not adequately capacitated to deliver on the policies of the day. We need more skilled and hardworking career public servants.
But for as long as we can all see useless politicians ruining the state, talent attraction will be a dream.
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