By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says the department of public enterprises will cease to exist in future as state-owned enterprises will fall under their relevant line departments.
Ramaphosa answered questions in the National Assembly on Thursday.
He said that a state holding company was still on the cards and this would make it easier to keep tabs on SOEs.
“We will be able to see exactly how each one is happening – board appointments, remuneration of directors and all that,” Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa said that not all SOEs were underperforming, citing entities like state insurer, Sasria, and Denel.
He also said that the number of government departments would be reduced even after increasing the number of ministries this week.
In the last few days we saw the addition of two new ministries and criticism that he failed to keep his promise to cut the “bloated” cabinet.
The additions took the number to 30 ministers from 28 together with the country’s 36 deputy ministers.
He defended his decision on Thursday, telling MPs that South Africa does not have the biggest cabinet in the world.
“You may want to recall that prior to 2019, we had 34 ministries, I reduced that to 28 with the initial reconfiguration and we’ve had 28 and I did also say the objective is to reduce further.
“Recently, what I did say at the State of the Nation Address, the Treasury, the Presidency including DPSA are going to look at how we further reconfigure, because their report had brought us to 28 and I want us to go below that 28.
“But this time around we are dealing with two key problems, electricity and I did say I would like to appoint the minister of electricity which would increase the number of ministries to 29 and in the course of looking at everything, including the enhancement of the capability of the state and the implementation process to get us over the challenges we are having, I decided that we now needed to have a ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation, which has now brought us to 30 and not the 34 that we had,” said Ramaphosa.