TONY LEON: Ramaphosa doesn't practise what he preaches
'On a wide front, we witness the opposite of joined up governance – uncoordinated and disjointed decision-making and the misalignment of announcements from stated policy objectives'
EXTRACT
Whatever the obvious advantages of government pulling together in co-ordinated fashion – aligning objectives to key and predictable outcomes, fashioning means towards ends and living within the scarcity of finite resources – no such approach is evident in the “new dawn” administration of Cyril Ramaphosa.
In passing, and perhaps as a nod toward this approach, the government even has a cabinet minister for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Tony Blair, in his first term as British prime minister in 1997, introduced the idea of “joined up government”. This idea changed and influenced, according to policy mavens, how structures are organised, how budgets are allocated and how public servants and their political masters and mistresses perform their duties. Since Blair was a self-proclaimed “moderniser” he escapes, I imagine, the tag “colonial”. It might just be possible, then, to have an adult discussion in South Africa on the merits of this approach without the infantile chorus of local “Toytown Trotskyites” (to borrow Blair’s colleague Denis Healey’s label) drowning out the discussion.But whatever the obvious advantages of government pulling together in co-ordinated fashion – aligning objectives to key and predictable outcomes, fashioning means towards ends and living within the scarcity of finite resources – no such approach is evident in the “new dawn” administration of Cyril Ramaphosa. In passing, and perhaps as a no...
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