I wish I lived in the same reality as communications minister Mondli Gungubele. I’m sure the whole of South Africa wishes it. In Gungubele’s alternative reality, the Post Office is a diamond in the rough that just needs “leadership” and “modern ways” of doing business.
This, at least, is the diagnosis he sketched out of the troubles ailing the postal utility in an interview on 702 during the past week.
Asked what the Post Office’s mission should be, he responded: “It’s an office which is run on service platforms. It’s connected, digitised, logistically focused. It must be a post office that you can interact with without driving, a post office that can actually affect product movement,” he told Clement Manyathela.
It needs to be “able to answer questions instantly” and be “modernly organised, as dependable as other logistical operations”.
I went back and listened to the whole thing. It isn’t reassuring. “It is not a charity … It must make money in modern ways, with more efficiency, fewer costs and more strategy.”
Listening to the minister espouse this unrealistic nonsense was like listening to the ANC’s usual wishful thinking about what it thinks it can achieve — while failing to acknowledge what it actually has done to the economy during its three decades in power. .
It’s the same lack of awareness about the failed health system, which the ANC thinks it can miraculously turn into a world-class system with National Health Insurance.
The NHI Bill is the most cynical thing the ANC has done in a long time. Mature heads in the party must know it is financially unachievable — even in Gungubele’s cloud-cuckoo-land — and will be challenged in court for its many flaws.
NHI is the ANC’s attempt to impose its own wishful thinking, detached from reality, on health care. Gungubele’s vision of the Post Office is similarly devoid of a realistic grasp of the true problems in the country — and the lack of capacity and lack of oversight that have turned so many state-owned enterprises (SOEs) into charities.
Gungubele, like so many people in the ruling party, fails to recognise that actually, government institutions have been decimated by the practice of hiring people based on their loyalty to the party (which in turns needs to find employment for its otherwise unemployable cadres), not their ability to get a job done.
Practically, it means there are no SOEs that function in the “modernly organised” way needed to get anything done. There is no evidence that Luthuli House even realises this.
Gungubele is, however, right about the importance of good management. “If you have as many skills in an institution, if there is no leadership, those skills are as good as nothing,” he said. At least he didn’t dispute the business rescue practitioners’ plans to retrench 6,000 of the failed institution’s 11,000 staff.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of that interview was his choice of a small town “as an example of disadvantaged communities”. “Someone sitting in Nkandla must be able to track his parcel without having to drive to a post office to see whether it has arrived.”
It's no small irony that the reason the Post Office and all the other SOEs are in the state they’re in is Nkandla’s most famous resident, former president Jacob Zuma.
* Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa