I have been thinking a lot about what I call the ‘agencification’ of government. Let me explain.
So there is this trend at all levels of government to adopt the practices of the private sector in the vain (in my view) attempt to improve service delivery to citizens, and generally improve the performance of government departments. Hence we have this explosion of ‘agencies’ at national, provincial and local level, spawning the likes of the South African National Road Agency Limited (SANRAL), tasked with the management of national roads, the Road Traffic Management Agency (RTMC) and its sister, entity the Road Traffic Infringement Agency (RTIA); both dismally failing at improving road safety in the country.
At the local level, the larger Metros have also jumped on the bandwagon, hence the Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA), and given the state of our leading city, the sadly misnamed Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA).
In a nutshell, the thinking behind this was to structure these entities along the lines of the private sector, by adopting practices such as high levels of customer satisfaction and service delivery, flat management structures and lean staff levels, striving to add more value than cost at all points of the organization, and generally striving to maximize revenue and minimize costs without comprising customer focus.
In addition, there is the creation and implementation of high levels of brand building and identification. Of course, as businesses grew, they adopted different management structures (management boards, executive committees, etc.) to better manage themselves.
Unfortunately, in their rush to ‘corporatize’, most of these state entities have merely ‘cherry picked’ certain aspects from the private sector, particularly those adding costs, rather than value, such as large highly paid boards of directors (read politically connected individuals), plush offices and the like. Alarmingly, where one would expect that the existing appropriate departmental staff would be ‘deployed’ to the new entity to exercise their duties under the new structure, it rarely occurs.
Case in point is our newest entity, the Border Management Agency (BMA), tasked with looking after the borders and entry points of the country. This responsibility was previously split between a myriad of government departments such as Home Affairs, SAPS, International Affairs, as well as SAPS and the SANDF, with perhaps hundreds of government employees involved. Yet in the past weekend’s papers, the BMA had full page advertisements for hundreds of posts. The question must be asked: what are these incumbents in the various departments now going to do?
All aboard ……the gravy train is about to depart!
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