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https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/the-era-of-governing-without-choosing-is-over
There are a number of interesting facets to this situation. First, note the government’s kamikaze style of management. This consists of allowing the State Owned Enterprises to recruit massively more personnel than are actually required and
There are a number of interesting facets to this situation. First, note the government’s kamikaze style of management. This consists of allowing the State Owned Enterprises to recruit massively more personnel than are actually required and
then to feed these swollen workforces with inflation-plus wage increases, year after year. This is the logic of a patronage state run for the benefit of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie.
That is, the real purpose of an SOE like the SABC is only incidentally to do with providing news or entertainment. Its real function, indeed its true raison d’etre, is to provide the maximum number of well-paid jobs for deployed cadres and their friends who, of course,
ensure an ANC-friendly service in return.
This ends up with the current situation in which staff salaries average more than R1 million a year per person. If you take account of the large number of gardeners, security guards, clerks, cleaners and secretaries employed by the SABC, all of whom earn a lot less than this,
you realise that a large number of its staff must be taking home quite princely salaries. Currently, salaries consume 45% of the SABC’s budget.
Secondly, the references to SAA and Denel (the state arms-maker) show that the SABC board has understood the game it is in. Because kamikaze management means recruiting so many and so well paid staff and then running the organization right into the ground.
SAA produced so many turnaround plans that its management seemed to be permanently circulating at speed in a revolving door. In fact this chorus of plans is a death rattle. It ended as we know with SAA reduced to a 1000 staff, 3 planes and still dependent on Pravin Gordhan.
Already the Minister for Communications, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, has once before prevented the board from pursuing this, its sole means of organizational survival, and she is doing the same thing again now. So are the unions, interdict in hand.
And Ace Magashule, out on bail as he may be, has told ANC MPs that it is their duty to refuse all job losses and that the SABC board “which has ANC deployees” must do the same.
How is this to be done? “The gov must find the money.” Since Magashule has proven remarkably proficient in his own career at just “finding the money”, no doubt this doesn’t sound quite as fanciful to him as it does to the rest of us. But it is a straight fight btwn ANC ideology
and economics.
These are early days, however. We know the Land Bank is also in trouble and so is the Empowerment Fund, that the Passenger Rail Agency is under administration and that Eskom is technically insolvent as is SANRAL, the national roads agency,
but undoubtedly the list of public entities in trouble will grow as the budget cuts begin to feed through. A very large number of municipalities are in trouble and the recent madly generous pay deal for municipal workers shows that kamikaze management is alive and
well in that sector too. The Post Office is closing down branches right, left and centre but since it last made a profit in 2006 mere survival still seems like a heady ambition. Ominously, the Post Office also falls under the buck-passing Ndabeni-Abrahams.
What we are talking about really is the crisis of the entire public sector, 4so long pampered by feather-bedding, overpayment and complete immunity from retrenchments. This crisis has bn accelerated by the way public agencies have lagged badly behind market trends and innovation.
Eskom’s decision to build two giant coal-fired power stations was criticized by the World Bank even when it was made but it looks sheerly ridiculous now, particularly since they don’t work. SAA’s decision to turn down a buyout from BA in the 1990s was similarly benighted.
The government could have made a nice profit and guaranteed the airline’s future as a feeder into a major world network. Comair and Airlink have been far quicker to sign up foreign partners.
When Telkom was corporatized a condition was that it would lay down huge amounts of cable so that poor people in rural areas had phones, something which the apartheid regime had wickedly neglected. A fortune was spent on this only for the said poor people not to pay their bills
so their phones all got cut off, so the investment was largely wasted. Alan Knott-Craig, then the head of Vodacom, pointed out that it would be miles cheaper just to give out free cellphones and erect a few more phone masts, but this sensible advice was brushed aside.
The SABC is still struggling with the century-old license fee structure. Two-thirds of its customers don’t pay the fee and the SABC is hoping, rather desperately, to get Multi-Choice and Netflix to collect their license fees for them.
Thus far, of course, the public sector (less SAA) has been wholly protected from job losses whilst the private sector has suffered 1.7 million losses. But this cannot really continue, particularly since it is clear that any spare money will have to go to prop Eskom up.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the 1.2 million strong public service itself.
We are in a mess because we have a civil service which is overpaid, overstaffed and can’t/won’t do its job.
The overall problem is how does one slim down the public sector in a state run for the benefit of a bureaucratic bourgeoisie? If the real raison d’etre of the state is to provide well remunerated positions for the ANC elite, is such a process of rationalisation even possible?
This test has come suddenly. The SABC board has a week in which to conduct “consultations” but they have no way out of job cuts unless the Treasury caves in and bails them out. But a bail out would simply mean that the SABC remained stuck with too many people and
too high a salary bill, so it would be no solution. The Treasury cannot cave in without throwing its whole budgetary strategy to the winds. Magashule & Cosatu will no doubt remind Ramaphosa that at his first Jobs Summit the president gave a promise that there would be no job cuts
The recent EU survey showed just how to do that: the two biggest factors impeding investment from the EU were our BEE and Equity Employment laws. Scrap those, deregulate and liberalize and the money will flow in.
Of course, even that would mean letting down other ANC constituencies but one could plausibly argue that 26 years of affirmative action and BEE favouritism was quite enough. No sensible company will want to do without black employees and managers in key positions. -
they don’t need to have their arms legally twisted to do that.
The era of governing without choosing is over.
R.W. Johnson
R.W. Johnson
