International organisations such as the World Bank have also emphasised the importance of skills audits in promoting good governance and effective service delivery in the public sector. Photo: Supplied
It seems more than a little ironic that the World Bank, in the form of its financial investment arm, finds itself entangled in South Africa’s social grants scandal and the private company at the heart of the delivery of the grants.
That company is Net1 subsidiary Cash Paymaster Systems (CPS), which more than one observer has seen as the unacceptable face of neoliberal capitalism – especially in the way it has entwined itself in a public-private partnership with the state, and has done so in a way that has made it very hard for the state to disentangle itself.
The World Bank and its related institutions earned a bad name in Africa and elsewhere when they tried to press countries into “structural adjustments” – trying, that is, to get them to turn into functioning capitalist nations, to pay their debts and to govern properly. Much of their programme was rejected or dissed by African leaders (once they had the money), and the World Bank and its sister bodies began to take a different approach.
Now, presumably out of the best of motives, the bank’s investors have put money into a company that claims to be helping the poorest of the poor while engaging in activities that look much like exploitation. If CPS is indeed fleecing the poor, the World Bank had better examine its conscience.