Ramaphosa suggests some Zuma appointments ‘not fit for purpose’

President Cyril Ramaphosa has suggested some senior officials appointed to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and law enforcement agencies during former president Jacob Zuma’s tenure in office were not scrutinised by the ANC’s cadre deployment committee.

Ramaphosa took the stand at the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture and was quizzed about the appointment of former Eskom and Transnet executives Brian Molefe, Siyabonga Gama and Anoj Singh as well as Dudu Myeni as SAA chairperson and former Hawks boss Berning Ntlemeza, among others,

The former officials have been largely implicated in allegations of state capture and corruption.

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Ramaphosa, appearing before the commission in his capacity as ANC president, said he did not believe most of these officials went through the deployment committee.

He said the aim of the ANC’s cadre deployment committee was to ensure individuals “most fit for purpose” are appointed to critical positions in the government.

“You will find that a number of those never even featured in the deployment committee… let us accept that some of those deployments were done in a particular era and in a particular way.

“And right now as we look at that past slate, we are able to look at it and say we actually need to do things differently [and] move away from those types of deployments that happened and ended up, some of them, being deployments that were not fit for purpose,” Ramaphosa said.

While acknowledging he needed to get more information about the appointments, Ramaphosa said each appointment should have been based on merit, not patronage.

Plans to professionalise civil service

The government is working to professionalise the civil service in order to increase the capacity of the state, Ramaphosa said.

He said he was obsessed with this because many of the challenges when it came to implementing government policies were due to a lack of skills in critical posts.

We want to professionalise the civil service and that will happen in a variety of ways. We are not talking about trucking people out, we are talking about capacitating those people and having them properly trained.

Ramaphosa said the National School of Government (NSG) was established to deal with skilling and capacitating people.

“We want to move to the point where nearly everyone in the public service, from the president right down, does attend lessons and courses in the school of government on an annual basis.”

Earlier this month, Public Service and Administration Minister Senzo Mchunu said nearly 35% of senior managers employed by national and provincial departments did not have the required qualifications and credentials for the positions they occupy.

Ramaphosa said his administration took the blame for this and this would be addressed.

“We are not about to chuck those people out, if anything we as the state are to blame for having brought in people who are ill-qualified.

“We need to address the problem humanely, taking into account the mistakes we have made and the rights of those people and it calls on us to be innovative on how we are going to capacitate all these people,” Ramaphosa said.

Public servants must be colour blind

Ramaphosa said the ANC’s deployees in government cannot be seen to be partisan when executing their duties.

He said the government needed to guard against partisanship and ensure public servants were neutral when interacting with citizens.

“There needs to be a balance between what I would say the political involvement of the governing party with ensuring there is technical proficiency and fairness in terms of service delivery and those who execute such are able to be neutral enough and not biased.

“That is necessary because the people we serve are not blind. When something is done on a partisan basis they see it and once it is done that way, it basically means we are failing the people and we are therefore even violating their basic rights as citizens of our country.”

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