Hypocrisy & Amnesia are stalking the South African political scene

Last week, councillors from the ANC and the EFF said one of the reasons they were voting for ActionSA’s Moya to be the new Mayor of Tshwane was because she was “well-qualified” and had the right experience.

After her election, the Gauteng ANC issued a statement saying, “the ANC in Gauteng welcomes with glee the election of ActionSA’s candidate, Dr Nasiphi Moya, as the new Executive Mayor of the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality”.

The leadership of the Cosatu-affiliate and ANC-supporting SA Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) said that “we are committed to working hand in hand with the new leadership to restore Tshwane to its former glory, a city that serves all its residents, regardless of their economic standing”.

Both the Gauteng ANC and Samwu have wilfully forgotten that the person they are talking about was the deputy mayor in the previous administration, of which they were very critical. 

The singing and shouting during the election by members of the ANC and the EFF showed this hypocritical amnesia in full flight. Someone who had been the deputy mayor of the previous administration they hated was now going to be the mayor. 

So why celebrate?

It seemed instead that these councillors were celebrating some other political victory – a defeat of a hated rival.

This kind of hypocrisy is displayed often in our local politics.

When a party decides to try to remove someone through a no-confidence motion, they often seek to justify it using personal insults and attacks on that person’s qualifications and performance.

But just weeks or months later, that party can then defend or even promote that very same person based on their qualifications and performance.

This has become so regular, it is almost not worth mentioning. What it does show is that the words coming out of the mouths of these politicians have literally no meaning.

But there is something revealing about this.

There would be nothing wrong or immoral with a political party standing up and saying: we want this person in office and we do not want that person in office. Or to simply say: we have reached a new coalition deal and thus we now support this person and not that person. It would have been politically rational for the ANC, EFF and others to have said last week that they want Moya to be mayor and not Brink.

It seems that by seeking to justify it, they are showing that they realise voters want more from politicians than just naked politicking. They are trying to cloak their real lust for power behind the claims about “competence” and “qualifications”.

Unfortunately, the same happens in national government.

There is even an entire department devoted to what appears to be utter nonsense.

The Ministry of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation comes complete with a Minister and a Deputy Minister (and no doubt four generators between them).

But despite the fact the current national coalition has now been in office for over 100 days, no performance contracts have yet been signed. 

As Daily Maverick’s Victoria O’Regan wrote in an important piece last week, this is despite pledges by the President that this would happen. 

So what has the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation been doing? 

Is there any action it has taken since the election that has improved governance?

No one can be surprised by this. 

When the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation was created in the first place (as part of the bigger Ministry of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation) in 2009, it was already clear that no minister would be held accountable in this way.

The President who led the introduction of this system was Jacob Zuma.

During his State of the Nation Address the next year, in 2010, he said, “Government must work faster, harder and smarter … the work of departments will be measured by outcomes developed through our performance monitoring and evaluation systems”. 

Instead of a “faster, harder and smarter” government, we got what the ANC itself labelled as “nine wasted years”.

It has never happened that a minister has been removed from office for failing to live up to their performance agreements.

And it has never happened that someone has been fired for being incompetent.

And, so long as there is a political cost to removing someone, it will never happen.

No one will be removed for failing to live up to their performance agreement. Instead, people will only be removed when dismissing them is the better political option than keeping them.

Thus, it will never happen that a President will remove someone from office for being incompetent, or for failing to live up to their performance agreement.

This means that this entire department (which is only part of the greater ministry) has absolutely no purpose. It has no reason to exist.

And no matter what changes will come in our politics, it is unlikely that it will ever have a reason to exist, simply because the politics of constituencies is more important to any political leader than competence. 

But that will not stop political leaders claiming in public, often, that they are making decisions based entirely on competence. If only to hide their real reasons.

In the process, they will reveal themselves to be hypocrites, to the point of maintaining an entire department in national government that can do nothing. DM