VINOTHAN NAIDOO: How Ramaphosa can best achieve his streamlined cabinet 2.0

Amid the heightened expectation about President Cyril Ramaphosa’s recent cabinet changes, a brief but significant announcement was made: the president had instructed his office, with the Treasury, to draw up a proposal to reduce government departments, entities and programmes before the 2024 elections.

This is a welcome step given the long-term growth in the number of cabinet departments, which Ramaphosa admittedly started to reduce in 2019 but which continues to feed perceptions of a bloated national executive. The rationalisation of ministerial portfolios he announced in 2019 was decidedly bolder than I had predicted, though in other respects it did not go far enough to reduce institutional duplication and reconfigure cabinet decision-making to facilitate more decisive responses to critical national priorities. It is hoped that rationalisation 2.0 will entertain more far-reaching changes in how cabinet departments are structured, and how decision-making is carried out.  

The temptation to reconfigure government departments is inextricably bound up with politics and policy. Establishing new departments can be used to reward political allies and advance the aims of specific interest groups, but can also be justified on technical grounds. Disestablishing or restructuring departments can be motivated by a functional rationale, but can also strategically benefit or sideline particular constituencies. It is not easy to disentangle these competing motives. 

Measure reduction

Therefore the task of proposing how cabinet departments should be reduced should not be confined to technocrats and their political principals in the executive. It should be open to public and parliamentary scrutiny. Though the constitution empowers the president to “co-ordinate the functions of state departments” … any reconfiguration of cabinet departments will directly affect parliament’s constitutional prerogative to perform oversight over executive organs of state. MPs have already expressed concern about an increasingly inflated presidency — including a new electricity minister — amid the absence of a parliamentary committee to oversee the presidency.

There is wide consensus that the national executive, embodied in cabinet departments, could be made smaller and leaner. Yet how do we measure reduction when the apparent simplicity of this goal is obscured by a need to distinguish between reducing “government departments” and the number of “ministries”?

Ramaphosa’s announcement conflated these things, which are not the same. A reduction in the number of ministers will not necessarily produce the same reduction in the number of government departments if departmental portfolios are simply combined under a single minister, as has previously been done.

Though this type of reduction can try to improve high-level policy co-ordination and synergy between complementary portfolios, it can also stretch the capacity of individual “superministers” to effectively oversee multiple departments under a combined portfolio, without generating concomitant reductions across and within departmental structures. This design principle calls for a separation between reducing “departments” and “ministries”, to provide a clearer picture of where and how deep are the reductions being made. 

Feed cynicism

Bolder actions to reduce the number of departments will disrupt the daily operations of departments, and make the public servants who staff them concerned about their job security. Any restructuring exercise will be disruptive, and should not be undertaken as a knee-jerk reaction to the latest policy fads or to solve short-term crises, or based on a predetermined optimal size driven by cost-cutting alone.

Ironically, these motives tend only to feed public cynicism that restructuring is merely an attempt to rearrange the deck chairs. It is therefore puzzling that Ramaphosa has instructed only his office and the Treasury to develop proposals to rationalise departments, leaving out the department of public service & administration, which has statutory responsibility for determining, regulating and advising on the human resource/staff establishment as well as structural makeup of government departments. Its inclusion would help to mitigate the disruptive effects of restructuring on staffing and internal operational processes, which will inevitably affect service delivery and staff morale. 

The modus operandi for reducing cabinet departments and ministries should ideally fall somewhere between minimalist (combining departments under a single ministerial portfolio) and maximalist (deep cuts driven largely by disestablishing departments), which could be highly destabilising and disruptive. An approach guided by “low-hanging fruit” could achieve more than a superficial reduction in the number of cabinet-level departments while minimising the number of departments that are disestablished.

This could be achieved by reclassifying or downgrading some departments from cabinet-level status to “government components”, or possibly even public entities, as well as undertaking “real” mergers of departments (two into one rather than two under one minister), or disestablishing smaller departments by absorbing them into larger departments (one into one). Mergers will require reducing internal structures and programmes to avoid the risk of superministries. 

Reducing the number of departments and ministries will mean little if it is not accompanied by an effort to change the wider structural configuration of cabinet decision-making. We no longer have time for large consensus-seeking cabinets and must shift towards a more hierarchical model of cabinet decision-making.

I have previously argued that Ramaphosa could opt for a two-track cabinet that distinguishes between a small hub of mainly economic policy departments such as the Treasury; labour & employment; and trade, industry & competition, and the full, but slimmed down, outer cabinet.

This model could help the government rank-order policy priorities more clearly amid competing demands, as well as demonstrate decisiveness and responsiveness to the most pressing issues. 

• Naidoo is associate professor of public policy & administration at the University of Cape Town.