CHOPPING AND CHANGING
JOHN DLUDLU: Zuma’s ruinous realm of shifting sands
"As well as the absence of a plan to dig us out of the crisis, part of this administration’s problem is its propensity to generate uncertainty"
It would be churlish to just dismiss as a complete waste of time last Wednesday’s medium-term expenditure framework. It had its uses: for example, we must commend the finance minister for a frank assessment of the state the country is in. He did well to tell us how bad the crisis is – public debt has soared to unsustainable levels, tax revenues are on the decline and the deficit is on the rise. But the absence of a plan to get us to the state we want to be in — an economy that is growing and creating jobs — is an unforgivable omission. It would be naïve to expect one man, Malusi Gigaba, to have all the answers to our problems. But, as I have argued in this space before, there are many things that are within the government’s control and those are the ones it ought to focus on. Two come to mind. First, the size of the public service is a large part of the proverbial elephant in the room. Not filling vacancies is old-style management, as is tinkering with salaries to arrest the runaway...
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