A few days after he was elected president of South Africa, I wrote to Cyril Ramaphosa, with whom I worked in the trade unions in the 1980s, and urged him to review the bankrupt policy of cadre deployment used by the ruling ANC since it won in 1994.
To criticise this specific policy is not in the least to suggest that the ANC must not deploy its cadres to posts in state, government and parastatals. That would be both unrealistic and naïve. No, what is palpably and in fact tragically clear for all to see after 24 years in office is that often the quality of the members the ANC has deployed has been abysmally poor, resulting in the evident malfunctioning and poor performance at every level of government and in every parastatal since 1994.

There has been an avalanche of poor and incompetent administration in all areas of the state and at virtually all levels of government and in all parastatals, to a greater or lesser extent…..more