In yet another attempt to rescue the beleaguered Department of Home Affairs, the South African Cabinet this week approved the appointment of a new director general, the latest in this department, which has the highest turnover of directors general in the government.
Mavuso Msimang, previous CEO of the IT parastatal, State Information Technology Agency, and former head of the South African National Parks (SANParks), will assume duty on May 15.
His appointment comes in the wake of a damning investigation by a heavyweight government task team into the ongoing disarray in the department.
The task team comprised the former director general of home affairs, Mzuvukile Maqetuke; the director general in the Treasury, Lesetja Kganyago; the director general in the Department of Public Service, Richard Levin; the director general in the public service commission, Odette Ramsingh; and the accountant general in the Treasury, Freeman Nomvulo.
In March, nearly a year after the task team began its work, it presented its findings.
The team found that there was a “lack of strategic leadership and management capability” in the department; that the lack of management meant that the department’s transformation agenda was collapsing; that “there was a lack of urgency and adherence to deadlines”; and that there was “a general crisis response to problems due to a lack of adequate management plans”.
The task team recommended the urgent appointment of a director general who was a “hands-on manager, transformational leader and excellent administrator”. Msimang’s background is largely in humanitarian affairs and environmental conservation and his success on various fronts bodes well for his new position.
He was in exile for 30 years, where he trained with Umkhonto weSizwe and became Oliver Tambo’s first secretary in the early Seventies. He then moved on to head various refugee and rural development programmes in Zambia, Kenya and Ethiopia. He graduated with a science degree, majoring in entomology and biochemistry, at the University of Zambia.
After his return to South Africa in 1993, he coordinated various NGO development projects before being appointed executive director of the South African Tourism Board and CEO of Tourism in KwaZulu-Natal.
In 1997 he was appointed CEO of SANParks. He steered the organisation from near bankruptcy into an attractive option for both government and private investment by the time he left in 2003. He has led the State Information Technology Agency with relative success since then.
Managing the Home Affairs Department may prove to be his toughest challenge.
The department has received qualified audits from the Auditor General for the past 13 years and the vacancy rate is conservatively estimated at 20%. A special report by the Human Sciences Research Council last year found that 1,5-million people eligible for green bar-coded identity documents did not have them.
In its Wednesday meeting, Cabinet also approved the appointment of a new national commissioner of correctional services to replace Linda Mti, who left under a cloud of corruption accusations.
The new commissioner, Vernie Peterson, was previously regional commissioner of both KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. During the struggle, he was a social worker in the Western Cape and an activist with the NGO, Nicro. This week, prisons trade union Popcru welcomed his appointment.
Meanwhile, Minister of Trade and Industry Mandisi Mpahlwa told the Cabinet that the National Lottery would remain suspended until at least mid-June. He said this decision followed a request from the National Lottery Board (NLB) for more time to complete an investigation into the shareholding of the various bidders competing for the lottery’s operational licence.
Mpahlwa suspended the lottery in March following a high court ruling regarding procedural irregularities during the NLB’s awarding of a new licence to the Gidani consortium. Many Gidani consortium shareholders were political office bearers, which raised questions of conflicts of interest.
Mpahlwa said this week that the most recent delay had been caused by a lack of cooperation from the bidders with the investigators from the NLB.
“Not all the information we have asked for from the bidders has been received,” he said. “The information we need is generally about their shareholding; it’s information they hold.”
He said once this matter had been resolved, the legislation defining the right of political office bearers to enter into business deals would need to be reviewed.
Mpahlwa said the latest delay would not stop payments to good causes and ticket-holders. “We have enough reserves.”