Anthony Butler Business Day, 11 May 2009
SELECTING a Cabinet appears deceptively easy. What could be more straightforward for a new president than to choose ministers on the basis of ability, experience, and ideology?
Unfortunately, as President Jacob Zuma demonstrated yesterday, a president preparing a new team must make difficult compromises and take hard decisions for which he will not be easily forgiven.
If a Cabinet is to work – and to deliver “visible socioeconomic development within five years”, as Zuma promised, it must be feared but also respected as legitimate.
For this reason it needs to represent the country´s regions, ethnic groups and races. It must reflect the African National Congress´s (ANC´s) ideological diversity. And big spending and strategic departments require high-level managerial competence.
Zuma´s difficult compromises have not managed fully to resolve the contradictions between these different demands.
First, his institutional reforms are problematic. The Cabinet was already too big, and now it is bigger. In the Presidency, the second minister in the Presidency – the new gatekeeper – will be former Limpopo premier and head of Zuma´s transition team, Collins Chabane. He is formidable, and he will probably be a more sympathetic figure than Essop Pahad in this role, but can he work with Trevor Manuel?
Second, the long-awaited announcement of the National Planning Commission (NPC) under Manuel was delivered with an unusual emphasis. The NPC will set out a “single national plan” to which “all spheres of government” will supposedly adhere.
Manuel will apparently have “monitoring and evaluation competencies” to back up his authority. This seems like a dangerous, unconstitutional and impractical set of ideas. Would anyone accept this if Manuel was not in charge?
What will happen when Manuel departs and this position is given to a minister without his long and impeccable track record?
Dangerous institutions should not be justified by the particular individuals who currently occupy them.
The NPC will remain dependent on the Treasury to say no to nonpriorities, ensure value for money and perform the rudimentary quality assessment of proposed programmes that is necessary to prevent the waste of public resources. On this score, Zuma has in a third key initiative gone ahead with his carefully flagged decision to make Pravin Gordhan the minister of finance.
This is a good but misunderstood choice.
Gordhan has carefully cultivated the air of a quiet and unexciting man, but he was for two decades at the heart of the South African Communist Party and ANC underground in Natal.
He is the lynchpin that holds together the government´s significant new power networks from south Durban and elsewhere. The South African Revenue Service has provided him with the best vantage point possible on the rise of the new elite and on its vulnerabilities.
Fourth, the new Cabinet has a different ideological cast in its junior economic ministries.
Zuma has split the Department of Trade and Industry in two, handing “policy” to Ebrahim Patel and “implementation” to Rob Davies. The Treasury and NPC will decide, but there will be conflict and uncertainty. It is a shambles – and just to provide a fig leaf of ideological respectability.
Fifth, the most dangerous part of the state, the informal “security state”, contains Zuma´s closest confidants. Lindiwe Sisulu is at defence, Nathi Mthethwa at police, Siyabonga Cwele at “state security” and Siphiwe Nyanda at communications. This “spook and eavesdropping”
informal cluster may well be running foreign policy too, because Ebrahim Ebrahim and Limpopo aristocrat Maite Nkoana-Mashabane will surely not be doing do.
Finally, there is Tokyo Sexwale. “Minister for human settlement” may sound like a lowly job for a man with such high ambition, but he may well have made the most astute compromise of all. We are likely to see a good deal of him, hard hat on his head, delivering houses to people young and old across the land.
# Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.
May 11, 2009
government