DELEGATION OF AUTHORITY
Israel boycott lobby has captured foreign policy of ANC and state
The decision to downgrade relations overshadowed other international issues at the party’s national conference
Much has been made this past year of "state capture", which is the comprehensive control of the policy-making powers of the executive branch of the government by wealthy private actors, in collusion with public servants and politicians, to engineer and benefit from preferential contracts with state-owned entities. In SA, it took the form of the notorious Gupta family allegedly controlling almost every aspect of the executive branch’s decision making and consequently having dominion over state-owned enterprises such as Eskom. However, another more subtle form of state capture has manifested in SA, and will invariably pose more challenges in the next few years. It is not driven by corruption, but by knowledge deficits in the government, and populist rhetoric and policies often open to varying interpretation and therefore implementation. This form of capture elicits power and control over state entities, but its end result is the permanent delegation of the policy making abilities of t...
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