We can’t afford to continue to squander our national resources on SOEs

Business Unity South Africa president Bonang Mohale is not going to be popular with the ANC for his remarks that the government has not learned from the apartheid era about how to harness the muscle of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to build a nation.

Mohale noted that, under the National Party government, SOEs were used to haul the Afrikaners out of poverty – but, at the same time, the companies established critical national infrastructure and services. He was also scathing in comparing the current morass of our SOEs to what happened in the past.

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The Afrikaners, he said, “put their best foot forward. We are putting absolutely our worst”.

Coming from him, the criticism cannot easily be dismissed by the ANC as the racist ramblings of a disgruntled white person.

And he is spot on: our SEOs – which have sucked up almost R400 billion of taxpayers’ money for bailouts in just the last nine years – have been ruined, not by black people, but by incompetent cadres deployed to the companies by the ruling party.

This system of reward for political loyalty has been the ANC’s main form of patronage and has enabled many in the party to become rich through direct salaries (which total an average R2 billion a year for CEOs and top executives in the 700 state companies) and through corruption. That applies both to the deployees and those who deployed them.

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Even more distressing is that the government continues to throw good money after bad.

Research by the Democratic Alliance shows that bailouts have accelerated during the time Cyril Ramaphosa has been president, giving the lie to his grandiose “New Dawn” promises of 2018 that he would root out corruption and inefficiency.

Should these companies be privatised? Will that make things any better?

We cannot afford to continue to squander our national resources on them.

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