Constructive quests for greater levels of coordination and integration in government to improve the executive’s performance and the government’s planning capacity must be supported.
But it cannot be achieved at the expense of democratic accountability to the people and the poor. This is exactly what the pursuit of the developmental state, as the ANC envisions it, will do.
The ruling party wants a state that can “intervene in the economy to coordinate and drive transformation”, with a high-powered centralised planning commission and state-owned enterprises as the pillars of the state’s capacity to drive such interventions.
Moreover, the state would comprise a two-tier cabinet with a small, high-powered senior council of ministers and an expanded junior cabinet that would provide political leadership to government departments. These proposals are deeply problematic.
Firstly, while there are a number of established democracies where tiered cabinet systems are practised, such as in the United Kingdom and the United States, such systems come with caveats. They function best in societies where the political arena is competitive, where the life chances of people are determined by more than political allegiance and race, and where democratic oversight is not stifled by one-party dominance.
We cannot endorse a system whereby junior cabinet members in charge of delivery will be accountable to policy-creating super-ministers, who in turn will depend on a sycophantic ANC parliamentary majority to accede to their every whim.
Secondly, high-powered centralised planning commissions in the executive have not played a role in the success of any economically thriving, diverse, open society of our time.
The establishment of a politically impartial, world-class economic advisory service, modelled on the example of our own constitutionally protected, independent Financial and Fiscal Commission, should be considered instead. Such a service could make huge strides in promoting legislative oversight as well as providing the executive with the much-needed sustainable planning foresight.
Thirdly, the shift towards developmentalism has already failed roundly to deliver on its promise.
The myriad large-scale government-by-acronym policy schemes centralised under the Thabo Mbeki presidency and the focus on state-owned enterprises as growth drivers rang in this shift.
Programmes such as the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa, the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition and the Expanded Public Works Programme targeted unrealistic outputs wish lists such as a “skills revolution” and millions of “jobs”, only to disappoint.
Other programmes, such as Project Consolidate and the so-called presidential development nodes, were to improve service delivery and development in specific areas, with a particular focus on the improvement of local government, and also failed.
These plans proved complex and amorphous, difficult for the man in the street to grasp, and the capacity-poor government was unable to implement them properly. Parliamentary questions to the presidency in relation to these initiatives were also consistently met by a refusal to answer on the basis of line function.
In turn, the so-called “strategic” state-owned enterprises, such as Denel, Alexkor, SAA and the directionless pebble-bed modular reactor gamble have operated as sheltered employment structures rather than profit-making growth dynamos, while sapping billions of rands away from facilitating growth and employment, education, health and social development — a situation that simply cannot be allowed to continue.
An ANC government will never be able to implement large-scale developmental plans and successfully operate large state enterprises on a profit basis.
The dearth of necessary skills in South Africa is one thing, but it is the ANC’s cadre deployment policy which is at the core of the problem, as it prioritises political allegiance above ability and merit as a criterion for the appointment of senior and highly paid civil servants who are supposed to drive service delivery.
National treasury under Finance Minister Trevor Manuel has been a notable exception to this rule.
It is therefore deeply ironic that the Jacob Zuma ANC proposes that treasury should be neutered so that it ceases to be the “tail” that wags the “dog” that the rest of the state has become.
This irony runs deep, especially since ANC MPs have consistently failed to question treasury in Parliament on budget allocations, despite past calls by Manuel for more active legislative oversight — a phenomenon that was again on display with the consideration of the Appropriation Bill recently.
It is simply does not make sense: meritorious performance should be duplicated, not diluted.
It is also illogical that treasury and its relevant executive charge would not form part of a super-council of state, should there ever be one. It would therefore continue to dominate over more junior portfolios.
We can only surmise that the proposal to neuter treasury has much more to do with the finance department’s vulnerability to the so-called global neo-liberal “onslaught” under Manuel, rather than anything else.
If there is a most pertinent case for the metaphor of the tail wagging the dog, one should probably look no further than the situation within the tripartite alliance — at its recent economic policy summit in Mossel Bay, the Cosatu and SACP “tails” firmly wagged the ANC “dog” away from job-creating economic growth as the primary economic policy priority of the last decade and a half, in favour of an intensified redistributive and developmental foci.
The oversight mechanisms for a super-council of ministers and a super-planning commission to advance this agenda simply do not exist at the moment. There are no oversight structures in Parliament focused specifically on the presidency, or overarching policy initiatives driven from the presidency, despite the fact that there have been a number of them.
It is also highly unlikely that a future ANC parliamentary majority will concede to greater accountability through extended question time for the president and his council of state, through new committees to oversee a centralised planning commission, or ad-hoc committees to oversee the work of overarching policy programmes
The poor, the unemployed and the politically unconnected cannot continue to be imperilled, but this will happen if the ANC has its way with the future of the state.
Sandra Botha is the DA’s parliamentary leader