EDITORIAL: Malusi Gigaba adds insult to injury

Source: Business Day, 10/07/2018

Readers of the Financial Mail will be familiar with entrepreneur Dan
Brotman’s writing about his experience in dealing with the Department
of Home Affairs, including the familiar tales of indifference and lost
applications.
That article was narrow in its focus, concerned mainly with the plight
of relatively wealthy and skilled individuals, who in most cases, one
presumes, can afford to pay for the legal expertise needed to get
through their bureaucratic nightmares. That is if they don’t give up
and find somewhere else where their skills and jobs they create are
appreciated.
But this is by no means a problem for the elite. For every Brotman who
can make himself heard, there are probably hundreds of refugees who
are in a state of limbo, confronted by xenophobia and incompetence at
every step, and are completely voiceless. In a letter to President
Cyril Ramaphosa to mark World Refugee Day in June, Lawyers for Human
Rights described the department as having `very many harmful, unlawful
and cruel practices and policies` that disregard the values of the
Constitution.
If Gigaba knew how difficult it was for South Africans to get his
department to issue birth certificates, would he remain convinced
about the wisdom of making their possession a requirement for travel?
And South Africans from all backgrounds, from the middle-class
holidaymaker travelling with kids to the young township kid who cannot
go for a job because the department is unable to issue her with a
birth certificate, the victims of home affairs’ incompetency are
spread out across the country.
How insulting it must have been for those people to have to read
Malusi Gigaba, the minister in charge, bemoaning red tape. Sometimes
life really is stranger than fiction.
No reasonable person would disagree that `red tape makes it difficult
for decisions to move speedily`, or that as a result `things that need
to move quickly, take forever`. When the person making such a
statement is the one who is responsible for their suffering, citizens
would be well within their rights to assume that politicians are
having a joke at their expense.
This is a minister whose obsession with one particular costly
regulation is so complete that he is immune to evidence of the damage
being inflicted on the economy.
While the rest of the country is supposed to be rallying together and
seeking solutions to the unemployment problem, Gigaba has shown a
bizarre commitment to stringent visa regulations that have been shown
to have caused great harm. And the irony of the department making such
demands, given its own inability to issue documents in a timely
fashion, is also lost on the minister.
The indifference is not dissimilar to that displayed by business
leaders who don’t use their companies’ services themselves and so have
no idea of the customer experience.
If Gigaba knew how difficult it was for South Africans to get his
department to issue birth certificates, would he remain convinced
about the wisdom of making their possession a requirement for travel?
The complaint about the red tape was not the only bizarre thing that
Gigaba said at the Black Business Council roundtable in Sandton on Friday.
The man who has also held offices of state as head of public
enterprises and was briefly responsible for the nation’s finances
after one of former president Jacob Zuma’s midnight purges, also
complained about regular ministerial changes that created instability,
noting that `we don’t even know whether we’re still going to be here
to carry out these visions`.
To say that everything that this particular minister has touched has
not exactly turned to gold would be an understatement. Eskom and other
state-owned enterprises are in a sorry mess that threatens to
overwhelm the country’s finances, so much so that the government is
asking banks to help revive them. At least at the National Treasury,
he wasn’t there long enough to cause too much damage.
Considering that a court of law earlier in 2018 found that he lied
under oath, and his role in the Gupta passport saga, most voters are
probably wondering why Gigaba is still in government at all, whatever
his vision is.