Ministerial Handbook turmoil may — finally — usher in some accountability and greater communication from government

19 Oct 2022

While it appears the President’s decision to backtrack on the changes to the Ministerial Handbook has tempered some of our society’s outrage, for now, there is still much that the furore over the way ministers and deputy ministers are treated can explain about our politics. In particular, it demonstrates the apparent weakness of President Cyril Ramaphosa and the true motives of many who cling to high office.

Before we start: The real problem at the core of every new outrage is that those who are in power are so removed from the real problems that people face, that they are incapable of understanding, or simply cannot or don’t care enough to understand, what is really happening in the lives that millions of South Africans have to suffer through.

The Ministerial Handbook is but one of many symptoms.

Recent events show that the Presidency is attempting to control some of the political narrative for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Monday afternoon, Ramaphosa’s spokesperson, Vincent Magwenya, held a briefing and confirmed that Ramaphosa had decided to scrap the changes to the Ministerial Handbook that removed the cap on how much the government would spend for the electricity and water consumed at the official residences of ministers and deputy ministers.

Magwenya said this demonstrated that Ramaphosa was listening to the concerns of the people, and denied there was any attempt to introduce these changes less than transparently.

But, as Marianne Merten has explained, this does not change the fact that these decisions are made by presidential minutes.

Nor has there been any commitment to re-examine what is a much greater cost to the government: the amount of money spent on the VIP Protection Unit, an insane-sounding R3.122-billion every year — more money than South Africa spent in 2018 on land reform.

It may be important to ask at this point: What led to these changes to the Ministerial Handbook in the first place?

Perhaps the closest we have come to an answer is an interview given by Presidency Minister Mondli Gungubele on SAfm. While it is true that he lamented the fact that ministers had to pay their own medical aid fees, and giggled when it was suggested they should use public hospitals (and public schools? — Ed), he also explained that there was an issue with the billing system for official residences and that ministers were getting bills of up to R30,000.

The push for change

It seems that, in order to be successful, the push for change must have come from within the Cabinet.

This means that Ramaphosa gave in to the demand. And then, when the public was outraged, he backtracked.

In almost all democracies, as British Prime Minister Liz Truss has recently discovered, when a politician backtracks it is a sign of weakness. And the bigger the climbdown, the greater the weakness.

This is not necessarily a huge climbdown, and it is unlikely to have damaged Ramaphosa within his party or the Cabinet. But it demonstrates that ministers are perfectly happy to look out for themselves, ahead of voters — which could cause long-lasting damage.

What is slightly odd about this is that Ramaphosa and the Cabinet cannot be unaware of the power of the example they set when it comes to what they personally receive from the government, and how government money is spent.

In April 2020, while announcing an extension of the hard lockdown, Ramaphosa said: “In support of this effort, we have decided that the President, deputy president, ministers and deputy ministers will each take a one-third cut in their salaries for the next three months. This portion of their salaries will be donated to the Solidarity Fund. We are calling on other public office-bearers and executives of large companies to make a similar gesture and to further increase the reach of this national effort.”

The power of this gesture was not lost on others.

The EFF said that all of its public office-bearers would make a similar contribution.

But it is not clear whether the pledge by Ramaphosa was fulfilled and whether each and every member of the Cabinet at the time did in fact pay up.

Business Day reported in July 2020 that less than half of those in Cabinet had actually given a third of their salaries to the fund.

While it is entirely possible that every minister and deputy minister did make this contribution, there appears to be no public statement confirming it. And if not every person did make the payment, then it is only a matter of time before opposition parties take this up.

Generally speaking, a scandal about government money being spent on ministers is hay for all opposition parties everywhere. But in a demonstration of how our politics is changing, this furore has also demonstrated that with great power come pitfalls.

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The starting point for this latest outrage was a statement released by the DA’s Leon Schreiber, who detailed the changes to the Ministerial Handbook.

But on Wednesday morning, the Good party’s Brett Herron tweeted: “Premier earns R2.3 million per year. @Our_DA Premier Winde lives in a R177 million mansion with his family. He pays no rent, no water, electricity, sewerage or waste removal. The DA is right to challenge the @PresidencyZA on the National Ministers’ perks but the hypocrisy?”

This suggests that if you have any power at all, as the DA does in the Western Cape, you are vulnerable to the same kind of criticism you level at those in national government.

It is likely that the DA, in turn, will accuse Herron of hypocrisy. The leader of his party, Patricia de Lille, is the minister of public works and infrastructure and is responsible for the residences used by ministers and deputy ministers. So far she has remained silent on this saga.

In this case, there is plenty of hypocrisy swirling around. After all, all of the political parties in Parliament have MPs, who receive a salary from the government. And allowances after that.

The public narrative

Within all of this is yet another political dynamic.

It is an oddity of the past three years that there has been virtually no attempt by Ramaphosa to control or manage the public narrative. While he has appeared in public from time to time, and even answered questions, there has been a complete lack of off-the-record briefings, day-to-day interviews and all of the other minute-by-minute communication that his office demands.

In a democracy such as ours, this may feel like almost deliberate neglect of political communication and visible accountability to the people of South Africa.

In a sense, the job of a presidential spokesperson is to take the heat off the President, to do the difficult interviews and to make sure that the President’s view is expressed and heard. This function has been badly lacking in this Presidency since Khusela Diko had to leave the job under a cloud in the middle of the pandemic.

It is only now, with the appointment of Magwenya on the eve of the Phala Phala scandal some months ago, that this has started to change.

On Monday, Magwenya said it was his intention to have a weekly briefing where he would take questions on behalf of the President. This may be an attempt to bring more direction to the narrative. It may well result in more news stories reflecting Ramaphosa’s opinion on events in the public domain.

The importance of this cannot be overestimated. When Jacob Zuma was president, Mac Maharaj played a pivotal role in shaping the public debate. Whether or not one agreed with him, he played an important role and ensured that Zuma’s voice was heard. This may now happen in the Ramaphosa presidency.

There is evidence that our politics is entering a new phase, where demands for accountability will be louder and more difficult to evade, and politicians will have to answer more questions, more often. Unless ministers and deputy ministers understand this, and show they understand it and the hardships of most in our society, this kind of outrage will be repeated soon, with unpredictable results. DM

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The push for change

The public narrative