According to Dakota tribal wisdom "when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount".

It sounds so obvious, but management consultants point out that other strategies are typically tried instead.

You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse or go on an overseas trip to see how other cultures ride dead horses.

You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together.

What about lowering standards generally so as to include the dead horse?

Or reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired"?

You can even blame the previous owner/regime.

But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

We could have been spared much heartache if our government had followed this simple wisdom.

We kept riding the dead horse of Outcomes Based Education for years after it had become clear that it was impractical and worsened our educational problems.

In November last year Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga finally announced that "for all intents and purposes" the OBE policy was dead.

This was too late for thousands of young people who can't get jobs because they can barely read, write and count.

Another dead horse is the ANC's policy of cadre deployment. This has been absolutely ruinous in appointing unqualified and incompetent people because of the ANC's  mania to put their people in control, rather than the best person for the job.

Even senior ANC leaders admit that it is a major cause of service delivery failure and of corrupt relationships in the public service.

But instead of abandoning cadre deployment altogether, they see the solution in a more centralised control of the process.

Hence ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe warns cabinet ministers against making senior appointments without consulting the party's deployment committee.

It reminds me of another analogy, that of digging deeper in the wrong hole, rather than getting out and digging the right hole.

There is a similar problem with the Sector Education Training Authorities (SETAs) that are full of political appointees who have looked after themselves with massive theft and waste while doing little to resolve our skills crisis.

Huge bureaucracies have been formed by the 23 SETAs, with R16 billion under their control, taken from a 1% levy on business payrolls that is in effect a tax on employment.

It is a particular waste for hard-pressed small businesses as it is difficult for them to claim rebates or access courses from the SETAs.

It would be far better for them to receive tax incentives to do the type of training that benefits them most.

But even worse than refusing to dismount a dead horse is getting on a dead horse.

This is what the ANC Youth League's Julius Malema is trying to do by advocating the nationalisation of the mines.

Even the SA Communist Party's Jeremy Cronin knows that it is a dead horse, but Malema seems determined to pursue it even though it causes major damage to our image as a safe place for investment.

We should only pursue viable policies that have proved their worth elsewhere, rather than flogging all the dead horses that litter our political landscape.

Jack Bloom is a Democratic Alliance member of the Gauteng Legislature. This article first appeared in The Citizen.

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