Zuma: Mine’s Bigger Than Yours
So JZ has had his new cabinet sworn in. There’s plenty of comment on the good (although you’ll have to look hard), the mediocre (anywhere else they’d be the BAD) and the bad (truly terrible). But the thing that stands out is the sheer size of this cabinet: a full 34 ministers and 29 deputy ministers. Of course this is going to cost a fortune, as Justice Malala points out:
The whole thing is a waste of taxpayers’ cash.
First , the presidency has about 500 people working in policy and all sorts of other positions. Now President Jacob Zuma has added a Ministry of National Planning and a Ministry of Performance Monitoring to the mix. This is likely to entail a dramatic increase in employees.
Plus, cabinet ministers have been increased from 28 to 34. And every minister gets a blue light, a driver and a whole new department.
In these tough times, when companies are tightening belts, the government is failing to lead by example here.
Virtually every ministry has been renamed, which means millions of rands will be spent on rebranding, making new business cards and so forth.
This is not just ridiculous, it’s wrong.
So how big is South Africa’s cabinet? Well to put in an international perspective, here is a sample of cabinet sizes for some countries around the world*:
Zambia: 11
Germany: 15
USA: 16 (with a further 6 officials enjoying cabinet rank)
Japan: 16
Australia: 19
UK: 22 (with a further 6 officials attending cabinet meetings)
Brazil: (23 with a further 9 cabinet-level officers)
China: 27
India: 28
Zimbabwe: 36
Kenya: 41
* None of these include the leader (president, executive prime minister, etc.)
I noticed an interesting thing when researching these numbers: many countries appoint a single cabinet member to handle multiple portfolios. Take Julia Gillard of Australia, for example. She is deputy Prime Minister, as well as holding the portfolios of Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for Education and Minister for Social Inclusion (whatever that may mean). Strange as it may seem to South African politicians, most countries expect their cabinet ministers to actually work.
Zuma has two ministers in the presidency, delegating his primary roles of strategic planning and oversight to political competitors. So besides making speeches that his audiences like to hear, what is he going to do? Woo more wives? Defend more legal actions? Sue more cartoonists? Practise singing and dancing?
Big government is not healthy. An inflated cabinet, with each cabinet minister representing a government department implies big government. The Armey Curve predicts an optimum government size and it looks very much like we’re getting way too much government.
Neither are big cabinets efficient. In a recent article in Science News, The Undeciders – More Decision-Makers Bring Less Efficiency (paid content), the finding from simulations is that larger (more than 10 members) committees have lower efficiency than those with fewer members. The finding are summarised as:
The team simulated committees as networks in which each member was a node. Before a vote, each member’s opinion could be influenced by those of its immediate neighbors in the network; adjacent nodes could represent, for example, ministers belonging to the same political party. The simulation found that committees of 10 members or less could almost always reach a consensus (with one mysterious exception for the number 8). For larger committees, the chances of getting to a consensus were lower, and the chances decreased even more rapidly for committees of 20 or more. The results show that Parkinson’s law is not an accident, but “a robust consequence of the opinion-formation model,” Thurner says.
Editor’s Note: This “consequence” is a strong claim. At this point all one can claim is that the model and the observations happen to produce similar numerical outcomes.
Look forward to 5 years of expensive talk.
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