Should South Africa do away with deputy ministers?

Deputy ministers have never really made any sense, especially with a cabinet as bloated as ours.

Name the best thing a deputy minister has done for South Africa. I’ll make it easier. Name anything a deputy minister has done for the country. You wouldn’t even know where to start.

Until he was fired, the last time you probably heard of the DA’s Andrew Whitfield (formerly deputy minister of trade and industry) was when he was appointed. ActionSA has this idea of ridding South Africa of deputy ministers. It smacks of the brilliance of improving our education system by demolishing any school with a pass rate below 90%.

Yes, our deputy ministers suck, though I think Athol Trollip may have had slightly more trouble admitting that had he held one of those seats. You know who else has sucked? Ministers! Does that mean that we sack the lot? Who’d run the country?

There’s more to saving the country than saving some rands. At some point, you’ve got to make the rands too and, used effectively, deputy ministers can facilitate that. They could do the cool work, leaving the real ministers to sign off regulations, bake fairy cakes or whatever it is that they’re supposed to do.

Should other deputy ministers be axed after Whitfield?

Should other deputy ministers be axed after Whitfield? That’s on the president. He’s the one who’s supposed to leverage this bloated cabinet to his advantage.

The size of the cabinet must be the envy of every democratic executive head in the world. Yet here we are, focused on firing one because he went away without permission. Cool. Toss him out. Now let’s get to the rest.

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Are we going to toss the other deputy ministers too or will we have to wait for them to go to Dewetsdorp without permission? Do we have to wait until they’re given some sort of a job description?

Other than holding space, what is actually the role of deputies? If that could be defined or at least explored, that may help the country far more than saving a few bucks.

But then we also need to get the right people in. I didn’t know that deputies needed permission to travel from the president. Assumingly Whitfield was going on some sort of business. Whatever.

He seemingly knew he had to ask for permission and when it wasn’t forthcoming, went with the silence-implies-approval route. When your party is facing accusations of arrogance, it would serve one well to you know… be less arrogant.

I guess that’s the problem with having a bloated government. Responding to colleagues’ emails may tend to get a tad tedious, especially between the 4^th hole and 5^th tee.

Deputy ministers don’t add value, but they can

So, do we get rid of deputy ministers? A better question would be to ask if deputy ministers add value. That’s an easy one to answer. No. However, we can extend that and ask whether deputy ministers can have value and that may be a resounding yes.

It’s just unfortunate that in order to elicit the value from the pool of deputy ministers, we’d actually have to think about the work they’re supposed to do and, ugh, write it down, then bleh bleh, hold them accountable and, sigh, have some sort of expectations of them. That all sounds too tedious. It would just be easier to say , “we had them, they didn’t work, so let’s just can it”.

It’s this kind of creative bankruptcy that keeps us from doing awesome things as a country. If you had to get rid of everything that doesn’t work, you may be left with very little, especially in South Africa.

Why turning the things that don’t work into things that do is not an option is beyond me. It should be the first option but hey, why work at making something work when we can just dismiss it as a failed project?