As a member of BRICS, South Africa has one of the lowest growth rates, the highest unemployment rate, the lowest life expectancy rate, the highest inequality rate, and probably one of the lowest productivity rates. It is the latter that bothers the most. With high holidays approaching, South Africa's national lethargy is taking its toll. And it started with Human Rights Day falling on a Thursday.
As is our wont, many employees took off the Friday as well; worse many, in addition, will take off this week to benefit from a long holiday including Easter. These chancers conveniently forget that in December almost the whole country switches off the minute schools close and it remains switched off until school starts in January. In effect we have a 10-month year, exacerbated by holidays, which fall on a Thursday, so employees routinely take off the Friday as well.
The effects of this national inertia are felt most crucially with the Department of Home Affairs (DoHA). Government officials casually claim that since they have a backlog of 6 months, customers should be patient with the slow pace of service delivery. Here follows an account of a student intern who needed to have her visa renewed.
"The DoHA is an integral part of the institutional framework of the nation and the place where the majority of foreign visitors encounter their first taste of South African bureaucracy. Having gone there several weeks in a row, Home Affairs does little to inspire confidence and the long queues of chaos in un-air-conditioned premises leave much to be desired! A recent decision to centralise the processing of applications to Pretoria, has meant that common procedures such as applying for residency and business permits, far too often become bureaucratic migraines for a large majority of outsiders.
A combination of incompetence, arrogance and egoism meets you on a typical trip to the much-despised department. Customer service and organisational structure are entirely lacking when in fact applications should be processed expediently and effectively. Due to embarrassingly prolonged backlogs, this fails to transpire in practice.
When I attempted to inquire about the status of my pending application, I was met with impatience and disinterest from the officials. Attempting to ascertain any sort of meaningful information is a highly burdensome and emotionally draining experience.
The result is that a central organisation within South Africa's institutional framework loses all sense of credibility in the eyes of foreign visitors, who rapidly become disillusioned with the system. Any outsiders who spend more than a few weeks in the country are likely to be exposed to such departments. I all likelihood, they will catch glimpses beyond the first world veneer which greets them on their arrival to the country, to the third world foundations which lie just below the surface.
Providing foreigners with such a negative perspective is damaging to a nation, which is in dire need of more foreign direct investment to boost economic growth and consequently promote job creation. Recent legal proceedings which have been taken against Home Affairs by an immigration law firm as reported in a recent article by fin24, highlight the fact that many investment opportunities from abroad are being lost as a result of outside investors losing their confidence and patience in Home Affairs.
Lucrative business proposals are standing on ice for unacceptably extended periods of time, resulting in huge opportunity costs to a country, which can hardly afford such wastage. Furthermore given that tourism is one of the key sectors for economic growth and job creation, it is somewhat alarming that the government exposes foreigners to such discouraging levels of service provision."
Why not replicate SARS' high-tech institutional machinery to Home Affairs?
This article first appeared in Die Burger.
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