Daily Dispatch
When a cliche becomes a crisis
IT MAY be a tattered cliche, but it is true that actions (or inactions as the case may be) speak louder than words – as our politicians are starting to discover with increasing pain.
The recriminations over the social grant payment debacle continue to reverberate, and even if all grants are paid on time on April 1, it is still a crisis – even if President Jacob Zuma does not think so.
The simple fact that a constitutional showdown between the judiciary and executive had to take place before millions could be paid their grants is a stark symptom of executive politicians trying to be managers and creating potential disaster.
Such interference by politicians in the functions of bureaucracy leads to corruption and dysfunction, at the end of which the politician then simply stands back wide-eyed and declares somewhat disingenuously: “It’s not my fault”.
The job of executive politicians is to set policy and budget priorities, while legislative politicians turn these policies and budgets into a legal framework for action. The bureaucracy then has to get on and do the job within that legal framework.
The executive then has a duty to oversee the bureaucracy, through the various ministries or departments, so that the work is done according to plan, priority and budget, and account to the legislature who in turn account to the public.
The judiciary exists to make sure the legal framework is constitutional and that laws are enforced justly.
Just as the judiciary stands aside as professional and apolitical, so too should the bureaucracy – and this is where the wheels are clearly coming off.
Cabinet ministers (and provincial and municipal executive politicians) are involving themselves directly in how officials do their work – and making a mess of it.
Senior bureaucrats are frequently fired or “redeployed” when they don’t do what politicians tell them to do or do something they have not been told to do.
This is where the real crisis lies. Politicians are being allowed to tell officials how to do their jobs, rather than holding them to account when and if a job that should have been done is not done. How the work is done is not an executive politician’s business.
The grants debacle has brought the issue into much sharper focus because the consequences of the department’s failure were so disastrous for so many that it landed in the lap of the Constitutional Court, for it to intervene and spell out the realities of “absolute incompetence”.
We should be careful not to write off the grants failure as an isolated calamity, or even worse to try to deny that it is a crisis.
It is a crisis, and is happening on a scale that demands immediate remedial action from those whose job it is to oversee and be accountable – the politicians.
The government needs to spell out how the executive, legislature and bureaucracy interact to make sure the public’s money is used for what the public vote for.
We need a leadership able to understand the crisis, and assure the public another such fiasco will never happen again.