The Government of National Unity is finally in place and citizens have high hopes that its role players will shelve their petty political differences and get on with the job of making government work.
If it does so, it should be able to govern as the constitution envisages: openly, transparently, efficiently and effectively.
Central to this is to turn around our utterly inefficient and expensive state-owned enterprises.
These vital cogs in the state wheel have been allowed to slip into dysfunction and bring the struggling economy to a grinding halt.
How can a country develop without a reliable source of electricity, a stable road and rail network and functioning ports?
Over just five years, the government admits that it blew R283bn bailing out SOEs, with the lion’s share going to Eskom, Denel, Transnet and SAA.
In that time, only Safcol declared a R1m dividend to the government, its shareholder.
Essentially, the government spent R283bn for a R1m return.
That might have been acceptable if the huge cash injection had yielded a functioning electricity grid, a profitable airline, working port infrastructure or a reasonably functioning military technology conglomerate.
Alas, it did nothing of the kind. Those key SOEs are still largely failing and sucking up more and more funding.
Government will establish a state holding company for strategic SOEs called the State Asset Management Company. And the sole shareholder will be the state
One of the “new dawn” ideas appeared to be the creation of the National State Enterprises Bill, which sought to enable private equity investment in strategic state-owned enterprises.
With its obsession on centralising power within the state and hanging onto the economic levers of that power, the ANC scotched the idea and has reinvented the Bill.
It will instead establish a state holding company for strategic SOEs called the State Asset Management Company. And the sole shareholder in that company will be the state.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has also done away with the public enterprises department and centralised the co-ordination of SOEs into the presidency under his minister, Maropene Ramokgopa.
And Ramokgopa is adamant that not a single share will be sold to any private enterprise and nor will any of the logical line departments have any say in the functioning of any of the SOEs.
Essentially, the government’s answer to the bloated, absurdly expensive, inefficient and often corrupt SOE bureaucracies is to add another huge layer of bureaucracy to oversee them.
Ramokgopa says the Bill’s objective is to ensure that the state is the sole shareholder of the holding company.
But the state is already the sole shareholder in all its SOEs so this changes nothing at all.
It won’t clarify policy issues and is highly unlikely to improve individual SOE governance, performance, transparency or monitoring.
All it achieves is to add another clumsy layer to the already top-heavy and wobbly bureaucracy and further burden the fiscus with a growing salary bill.
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