Mungo Soggot
About a year ago at the Land Bank it took 13 signatures to authorise a cheque for R1 500. Non-menial staff at its Pretoria head office were all white, women had to wear uniforms and there were several married couples.
The men in these couples were never managers, because of a rule which obliged the wives of male employees to resign if their husbands were promoted to the rank of manager. The rationale was it would be inappropriate for other women to work with someone whose husband held such a powerful position.
Such dogma created a bastion of the previous regime’s warped bureaucracy and, through its distribution of generous loans to white farmers, one of Afrikanerdom’s most important props.
The bank has been reincarnated as an institution more in tune with the new government’s priorities in the agriculture field. According to Minister of Land Affairs Derek Hanekom, it will be “the main government agency providing credit in the rural financial sector”.
The institution has already undergone dramatic transformation: there are blacks in senior positions and there is a new, more representative board. Much of the bank’s 86-year-old legacy is nevertheless still intact, such as separate medical aid schemes for men and women.
There are many more changes to come on the human-resources front – particularly in the form of a rationalisation programme which could cut the head-office staff contingent from 330 to 150 in the next three years.
The woman in charge of these changes is development expert Helena Dolny. When she was appointed last May to wrench the bank into the 1990s, she says she felt rather like “ET”. As the widow of Joe Slovo, she probably had less in common with her employees than Steven Spielberg’s alien did with earthlings.
There was some hate mail at first, she says, adding that she also received a letter saying she was an “angel”.
Dolny launched the “new Land Bank”, emphasising its role as an institution which will also dispense loans to new, small-scale farmers, most of whom are black. The bank has recently announced a new range of services, split into gold, silver and bronze, with bronze being for new farmers.
Interest rates are pegged accordingly, between about 17% in the gold category for established farmers and 25% in the bronze. Dolny is also keen to use the bank to improve farming practices, and is considering providing financial incentives to farmers who improve labourers’ working conditions, for example.
“We are starting to explore what should be the difference between the Land Bank and the commercial banks. We should not think of just the borrower, but also the 1,2-million black farm labourers.”
Dolny still struggles to avoid criticism from both established and new farmers. In the old days the bank lent to white farmers at 8% interest. Hanekom and Dolny have been criticised by emerging farmers for not extending them such largesse.
While forging this new role for the bank, Dolny has also had to devote much time to its restructuring and inevitable, painful redundancy programme.
Next week management consultants Price Waterhouse and Ebony, a new empowerment consultancy, are due to present the board with rationalisation recommendations. Dolny says there has been much discussion about the looming cuts and admits it will be a difficult operation.
One of the sticking points is redundancy packages. Dolny says the old board agreed to a package about 12 times more generous than the average deal in a financial institution.
She says financial institutions generally spend about 60% of income on expenses. In the latest financial year, the Land Bank spent about 105%.
Where the 25 provincial branches are concerned, the general rule in such development outlets is that 80% of resources should be spent on delivery and 20% on administration. “It is probably almost the reverse. The Land Bank was superb at Kafkaesque non- essential bureaucracy.”
An automatic annual increase means many long-serving employees are paid far more than their private-sector counterparts and she has proposed a performance-based salary scheme.
If the bank is “really good” at increasing business, it could avoid retrenchments in the provincial offices. Dolny speculates that excess staff could be deployed as sales agents.
Thanks to the policies which bequeathed the 13 signatures, there is much duplication which has to be cut: work is done both manually and on computer at branch level and then again at head office.
The bank has never had a marketing arm, so Dolny has advertised for a marketing chief. This will no doubt not be welcomed by the bank’s commercial rivals, which have complained that the Land Bank has an unfair advantage as a state institution. The bank has a good credit rating and is self-funding
Dolny completed her doctorate in agricultural economics at the University of Reading in Britain and worked in the Mozambican agriculture ministry. She was adviser to Hanekom, and also sat on a commission of inquiry which probed the viability of the Land Bank as an institution in the new South Africa.
She is confident it was correct to preserve the bank, arguing that its provincial network makes it an ideal development body.
Just over a year after her appointment, she appears to have made good progress, even though the trickiest aspects of the restructuring programme have yet to be executed. Outside her office, in the far larger adjoining room which houses her secretary, a gaggle of middle-aged white officials awaits her, not in an atmosphere of obsequiousness but of enthusiasm.
But this enthusiasm has its limits. A few months ago some of these men – or their colleagues – were openly arguing against Dolny’s plans to scrap separate medical aids for men and women. For the moment they are winning.