OP-ED: Ramaphosa’s bold state reconfiguration charts an unclear direction

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OP-ED: Ramaphosa’s bold state reconfiguration charts an unclear direction By Vinothan Naidoo

How Cabinet departments are arranged, including their overall number, size and functional responsibilities can too easily be dismissed as dry and technicist in comparison to the party political intrigue that often accompanies who is chosen to lead them. The organisational form of the state is often overlooked in favour of its function, if we are to be guided by the adage:. But the size and organisational form of the state can be a crucial enabler and disabler of the state’s functional capacity.

It is equally the case that calls for a dramatic cut in the number of government departments, even to levels never seen before, can ring of hollow political expediency to criticise the fiscal and managerial stewardship of an incumbent government. Size alone is a blunt instrument, and there is no magic number that defines the appropriate size of Cabinet departments, only historical experience and shifting policy agendas to guide this.

In the context of the past decade, however, it represents a dramatic consolidation of departments which went beyond simply reversing some Zuma-era expansion by seeking creative departmental marriages elsewhere . Ramaphosa has elected to seize the moment to act with boldness instead of caution and fear of further aggravating policy uncertainty and clearly showed that he was not constrained by Zuma-era reconfiguration fatigue.

A strong “economic bureaucracy” is a touchstone of the so-called developmental state experience, and adopting a more aggressive approach to bolstering the economic policy capacity of the state would have resonated more strongly with the ambitious investment agenda he has laid out.

 

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