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Matekane’s biggest test

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PRIME Minister Sam Matekane comes into government with a strong mandate and substantial goodwill. We understand the euphoria and hope people have in his nascent administration.

The long list of self-imposed targets and timelines in his inauguration speech have only heightened the expectations.

We note that he wants to spend his first 100 days focusing on understanding the problems and implementing systems that will form the basis of his government.

Matekane has promised performance contracts for ministers and principal secretaries (PSs). He wants to plug leaks in the government’s finances, curb corruption and enhance accountability in the civil service.

He plans to engage stakeholders and push the devolution agenda. He says in two weeks the government would have developed a strategy to fight rampant crime and find answers to the M6.1 billion that the Auditor General had queried.

He wants a plan to monitor the government’s expenditure and use of state assets. State projects and parastatals will also be assed in the first three months. It’s a long and ambitious wish-list but one necessary to set the tone for a transparent and accountable government.

Yet if there is anything we learned from history it is that politicians should be judged by what they do, not their promises. The real test for Matekane will be in the implementation. His targets might look like low-hanging fruits but they are no simple tasks.

He will have to push against a civil service that has long abdicated its responsibility to serve the people. A public service teeming with people with no respect for accountability to either the government or the public they are employed to serve.

Matekane faces off against an establishment driven by vested and personal interests.

He is up against parastatals that have deviated from their mandate and made underperformance a second nature. Public enterprises that take more than they give to the government and the people. Perennial leeches that skive and underperform because they believe their roles are too critical for the government to allow them to fail.

When it comes to devolution, Matekane is going into battle with civil servants who want to hoard power and centralise the control of both resources and decisions at the expense of districts.

It is therefore predictable that many in the government will either actively or passively resist his attempt to implement systems to stop corruption and leakages.

They have become accustomed to enriching themselves at the government’s expense and treating state financial regulations as minor nuisances to be ignored at whim.

Blame that on the lack of consequences for those who have been caught hand in the cookie jar or have just bungled due to ineptness rather than ill-intention.

Matekane is going against a system that has been allowed to rot for decades. It’s a culture so potent that it has captured, swallowed and corrupted his predecessors. Changing that system will not be a 100-days’ work.

And he might soon realise many of the people that are crucial to implementing the culture change he desperately craves are either its captains or woefully unprepared to drive the change.

In that case, shuffling people across roles and departments would not be sufficient to achieve the desired results. He will have to let go of some people, some of whom have been his staunch supporters.

We strongly suggest letting go of some principal secretaries and paying off their contracts. That will be expensive in the short term but vital to the broader goal he wants to achieve.

These are hard decisions Matekane has to make within the first 100 days in office if he wants to live up to his promises of creating a strong, vibrant, self-sufficient and sustainable economy that delivers value, jobs and better lives to the people.

He has set himself the targets, now he has to deliver.

 

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