“Cabinet reshuffles hit provinces hard, largely because of their impact on co-operative governance that the Constitution requires on almost every issue. Building a constructive relationship between provincial MECs and national ministers is essential to getting the job done. It sets the context within which officials in different departments work together. And often a project requires co-operation between various departments at different levels simultaneously.”
Cabinet changes for political rather than governance reasons will affect provinces in terms of inter-level communication. But provinces have their mandates until the next election and budgets for the year, so I'll wager that impact is minimal. More important is the long-term, systemic failure of the public sector to deliver services.
Reviewing six themes – ethics, resource optimisation, service delivery, compliance, transparency and accountability and expenditure management – from multi-year Public Service Commission and Auditor-General of South Africa reports, David Fourie and Wayne Poggenpoel (2017, South African Journal of Accounting Research) say “findings resurfaced, on average, 6.17 years in a nine-year period. Key challenges have less than a 50% chance of being resolved, if at all. These recurrences imply overall the public sector struggles to address functional and process issues that affect efficient and effective delivery of services.”
Public sector workers are the new elite. From cleaner to CEO, politician and cadre they're paid 30-40% more than they're worth without a concomitant sense of duty, accountability and efficiency. And it's happening in the Western Cape and City of Cape Town too, so Zille should not be complacent.
If and when the city runs out of water by March 2018, the DA will have an impossible job convincing the South African public they can run a government, let alone city or province, the latter two they often brag about. The number of clean audits will mean nothing: it took them 10 years to bring SA's second city to disaster; the ANC only destroyed SOEs, in comparison, far less important, in twenty.
And that's the blind spot of Zille's and party leader Mmusi Maimane's (DM's #CapeWaterGate article last week) analyses. The DA's (almost daily in PoliticsWeb) and their supporters’ continuous criticism of the ANC's flaws while ignoring their own (I've experience of serious instances within Zille's and Cape Town Mayor Patricia De Lille's administrations) due to a delusional sense of infallibility means they can't or won't recognise it.
In her column this week Zille says they (her DA administration) “seek the best available fit at the top”. Generally, that's not true – mayco member for water Xanthea Limberg and De Lille are examples of not the best, and there are others too. The fact is, in South Africa, governance, including DA's, is defined by rewarding political loyalty and expedience over competence.
So regarding good governance, Zille’s legion of fans (ironically, these supporters – middle-class and purportedly well-read – criticise Zuma’s and ANC’s for their blind spots) believes she'd have done things differently about the water crisis. About blind spots, all parties and their supporters have them; we support family and friends even when they've committed outrageous acts.
The fact is we don't know what she would've done in De Lille's place. Faced with a similar scenario, it's likely she would've done the same – who knows, in Limberg's place we might've had someone equally clueless. The Cape Town Stadium is Zille's albatross, like the water crisis is De Lille's.
My point is, Zille et al are not immune to ignoring problems, especially politically embarrassing ones, and for focusing on issues that generate political capital, which often have little to no relevance to their key functions (as her column, in which she claims to be an authority on many things, shows). Objectively, is she a better manager than De Lille? Perhaps, but she suffers from the same superiority complex and failure to self-reflect, as her obstinacy with her colonialism tweets proved.
Her supporters don't say why she'll have done things differently about the water crisis, and instead continuously blame the DA's bad decisions on ANC, an irritating and ignorant tendency I’ve often criticised. She wouldn't have done things differently, though, because she's part of a machine – the stadium proved it. She lifted her moratorium on the stadium saying she was “satisfied the financial model [to build] would not impact ratepayers”. But she knew it was unsustainable – a city-commissioned study at the time said so (I estimate it costs over R100 million per annum today). She lied, the first reason (of many subsequent ones) I began losing faith in her. But, in mitigation, I accepted she/city were under huge pressure.
Her articles are often self-promoting (bad form), tempting sceptics to disprove her. She unctuously said Western Cape executives (her, MECs and heads of department) are exemplary and the problem is lower down the management ladder, thereby conveniently exonerating herself. It's an untrue generalisation. I know for a fact she and some of her executive colleagues have failed governance in cases but she disingenuously points out ANC's faults.
Adapted from comments posted on Daily Maverick on October 23 and 24 to the article.
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