Nepotism order of the day

OUR country lurches from one crisis to another. Whether it be junk status, economic recession, a crisis of corruption, a crime wave crisis, a health or service delivery crisis or even the widespread crisis in our state-owned enterprises, they all have one point of origin.

The fundamental problem is one of poor management. We have a “crisis of management” in a large swathe of institutions.

The origin of this malaise is the ANC policy of “cadre deployment” which has meant, in many cases, that people are deployed for political reasons to positions for which they are not trained or experienced enough.

Blatant corruption and nepotism has added to the problem.

The deployment of people in the manner described has two fundamental weaknesses.

First, there is the obvious problem of being incompetent to do the job.

Second, there is the problem that having been deployed to an unfamiliar job as a political favour your attention is not necessarily on the job at hand, but rather it is on holding on to the job by keeping your benefactor happy – whatever that may entail.

The results of this crisis of management are plain to see.

Only when we return to appointing people based solely on their competence to do a job will we be able to solve the myriad issues we have in our country. Fairland