Ramaphosa should aim for few, high-impact initiatives
My favourite tweet this week was by Shakespeare, or possibly an impostor, commenting on a new BBC series about the Trojan War. The bard was not a fan. “Cassandra gave me her review of #TroyFallOfACity a week ago. I should have listened.”
My second favourite social media post was from Brian Levy, a friend. He was worried by an editorial in Monday’s Business Day sub-headed “What Ramaphosa can get cracking on with urgency is reconfiguring and co-ordinating the government”. It brought out the Cassandra in him, and she spoke the truth.
Levy, a veteran World Banker who now divides his time between the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington and the Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice at the University of Cape Town, is author, most recently, of Working with the Grain: Integrating Governance and Growth in Development Strategies. He knows how governments function in settings such as SA.
“I am hugely wary of the swamp of ‘reconfiguring and coordinating government’,” he writes. “I led the World Bank’s Africa public sector team for five years. I know first hand that gains on this path come slowly at best — and all too often lead nowhere… It’s a recipe for inaction.”
The focus should be on a limited number of “highimpact” initiatives, say four to six, that can yield tangible nearterm results, “build positive momentum” and “deepen optimism”, he argues. Sorting out the Mining Charter is a good example, and Levy is pleased it is high on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s agenda.
Levy is all for thinning out the bloated herd of ministers and deputies Jacob Zuma left in his baleful wake. Cull, he says, but don’t “get overly preoccupied with the microdetails of reorganising”. Playing with the deckchairs is tempting for politicians who want to be seen to be doing something. But the temptation must be resisted by those — Ramaphosa is clearly one of them — who want to get real stuff done. Government is messy at the best of times. Live with it, for now at least.
Says Levy: “Reconfiguring and co-ordinating” is a marvellous agenda for large teams of highly paid consultants. It offers them an endless workstream — and when the process turns out to be slow and doesn’t show results, they then call for patience (and more contracts), arguing that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
I can relate to that after my years with Brand SA, an organisation in a constant state of reinvention after its first CEO, Yvonne Johnson, was given the heave-ho by Essop Pahad for knowing what she was doing. Enter then the armies of consultants and facilitators with whiteboards, the constant decamping to the Midrand conference centre archipelago, the orgies of organograms, matrices and flowcharts, and finally the triumph of process over action, process being what organisations use to convince themselves and those to whom they answer that they are making an actual contribution.
What is Brand SA doing nowadays? They have blocked me on Twitter, I think for correcting their spelling, and I haven’t heard or seen mention of them in ages, unless you count the odd sighting of the logo. Is one of the Gupta brothers still on their board? If they are still around and Ramaphosa is in reconfiguring and co-ordinating mode, why not hand them back to the Government Communications and Information Service? Then turn over the reputation management and investment promotion side of things to credible third-party endorsers and explainers in the private sector. They’d have more impact. Might be a lot more cost-effective too.