Note to editors: The following speech was delivered in Parliament today by the DA's Shadow Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Dr Michael Cardo MP, during the budget vote debate on the Presidency.

The emperor in the “imperial presidency” has no clothes

Madam Speaker

Honourable President and Deputy President, Honourable Ministers and Deputy Minister in the Presidency

Honourable Members

In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger published his ground-breaking work entitled The Imperial Presidency.

He argued that the American presidency was out of control. He showed how, over time, the presidency had come to exceed the constitutional limits of its power.

Today, in South Africa, we sit with an imperial presidency.

The emperor-president has too much power.

As Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke has noted, there is “a remarkable concentration of the President’s powers of appointment”.

To give a few examples:

The President appoints all judges on advice from the Judicial Service Commission, and acting judges in consultation with the chief justice.

The President directly appoints the Chief Justice and the Deputy Chief Justice, and the judge presidents of other courts.

The President appoints the heads of key public oversight institutions, including the national director of public prosecutions, the public protector, the auditor-general, members of the South African Human Rights Commission, the Commission for Gender Equality, and the Electoral Commission on recommendation from the National Assembly. He may remove members of chapter 9 bodies on specified grounds.

The President appoints the governor of the Reserve Bank and members of the Finance and Fiscal Commission.

The President appoints commissioners of the Public Service Commission, the head of the defence force and the military command of the defence force, the head of the police, and the head of the intelligence service.

The President appoints Commissions of Inquiry.

And the President appoints the boards of public entities such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), commissioners of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) as well as all ambassadors.

Of course, the President must have the executive authority to make appointments. But, increasingly, the President’s powers of appointment are being abused for political ends. They are being abused in a way that the drafters of our finely balanced Constitution could not have foretold.

Too often, instead of appointing the most capable, the President appoints the most pliable. Instead of putting his country first, the President puts his cronies first. Instead of using his power to build institutions, the President uses it to break them down.

It is why we have a broken National Prosecuting Authority that cannot prosecute the President without fear or favour.

It is why we have a broken revenue service that refuses to investigate the fringe tax benefits from Nkandla, the emperor’s palace of corruption built with taxpayers’ money.

It is why we have a broken Special Investigating Unit, a broken Hawks, and a broken SAPS.

In fact, there seems to be no end of institutions that the President is not willing to break in order to protect himself and his friends, and to shore up the imperial presidency.

Now, the President has trained his sights on the Electoral Commission.

Last month, after Parliament was railroaded, the President appointed his close friend Vuma Mashinini as an electoral commissioner.

Instead of “Bring me umshini wami”, the President seems to have changed his cry to “Bring me uMashinini wami”.

Mr Mashinini has been employed in the Presidency since 2010, raking in millions of Rands as a “special advisor” to the President.

And now he is earmarked for the top job at the Electoral Commission. But after all these years of being in the pound seats of the emperor’s carriage, we have to doubt whether Mr Mashinini can be independent and non-partisan when the ANC loses elections, as it increasingly will, starting with the local government elections next year!

Speaker, the time has come for a constitutional review of the President’s powers of appointment and removal.

Now, we may have an imperial presidency, but we also have an emperor with no clothes.

The President likes to don the robes of the National Development Plan (NDP). But they are see-through. And what we see is the red petticoats of Messrs. Davies and Patel, and the other loony lefties who hold the Presidency and the economy in a corset-like vice-grip.

In fact, the NDP lies discarded on the dressing-room floor while the New Growth Path, the Industrial Policy Action Plan, and a whole host of statist policy, law and regulations – all of which went out of ideological fashion decades ago – are paraded around in all their ragged tattiness.

Speaker, the Presidency sits at the apex of government. It directs all government business. It leads the coordination, planning and monitoring of government policies and programmes. It is responsible for integrated planning and policy coherence.

But we have no policy coordination and no policy coherence. And what monitoring there is, is inadequate.

A few weeks ago in Parliament, the Statistician-General, Mr Pali Lehohla (also appointed by the President, incidentally) told the Standing Committee on Finance that we still don’t have a set of indicators to measure progress on the NDP.

He said: “The goals and targets in the NDP are clear but the methods and indicators to inform progress [are] woefully inadequate. The absence of an evidence framework undermines the credibility of good intentions and actions.”

Three years after the Plan was adopted, and all this government can offer us on the NDP are good intentions.

Truly, the emperor has no clothes.

The Presidency, through a dedicated Deputy Ministry, is also responsible for co-ordinating youth development, which it does via a transfer to Vote 8.

Overall, the National Youth Development Agency (the NYDA) consumes 57% of that budget vote.

This makes no sense.

The NYDA has a history of fraud, corruption, and irregular and wasteful expenditure. And yet every year we entrust it with millions of taxpayers’ hard-earned Rands.

It spends R186 million of its R409 million grant on salaries. That is over 45 per cent of its available resources on feeding a bloated bureaucracy, not providing opportunities for the youth.

We are constantly being promised that the wage bill is going to be slashed, pending the outcome of an “organizational review”.

In July last year, in his response to this very budget debate, the Deputy Minister in the Presidency Buti Manamela claimed: “We are turning the corner in supporting the NYDA, and we hope that, in a couple of months, we will be announcing the fact it has reduced its wage bill significantly”.

That was 10 months ago, and nothing has changed. I hope the Deputy Minister will be able to update us with good news today.

Speaker, we have a youth unemployment crisis on our hands. Youth account for 67% of the unemployed.

Yet in 2015/16, the NYDA will spend only roughly one third of what it does on salaries on its two flagship programmes: “Economic Participation” and “Education and Skills Development”.

What, in fact, has the NYDA done to foster economic participation and develop youth skills?

We know what it hasn’t done, because its latest Annual Report revealed that in 2013/14, the NYDA enrolled only 19% of targeted youth in its much-vaunted Matric Rewrite programme.

This programme aims to give learners a second opportunity to pass.

Well, clearly, the NYDA doesn’t know its pass from its elbow, because it also underachieved by 42% its target of supporting 100 000 young people through job-preparedness programmes.

The time has come to close down the NYDA. Let us channel its budget into a real youth wage subsidy (not a watered-down Employment Tax Incentive), into structured youth development programmes, and into bursaries for educational opportunities.

And, finally, let us scale back the imperial presidency, especially the President’s powers of appointment.

The emperor needs to co-ordinate his policy wardrobe with greater uniformity and better judgment in future. If he doesn’t, not only will his wardrobe be threadbare, but the emperor will stand bare before an unforgiving world, and the legacy of his imperial presidency will hang by a thread.

Issued by the DA, May 26 2015