There was more than a hint of concern in my mind too, but let's deal with the happy bit first.

In case you missed it, and it wasn’t difficult with all the screaming arguments around the Civil Unions Bill, which passed on the same day, this is what the Honourable Minister of Finance said, in essence: government tender awards should not only consider being race and gender representative, but also meet the tender specifications. Hallelujah!

He went on to produce two proofs, one concerning a road that fell apart after two years of use and the other being the substandard build quality of RDP houses on a site in Mpumalanga.

Both projects were completed by companies that satisfied all the PDI requirements but were lacking in everything else.

It may not sound like much to the outsider, but I’d like to see a possible swing that may just change the direction of the economy in it. You see, the government and its parastatals are by far the biggest customers in this country. This is a fact of life. So is the empowerment. Combine with standardised and heavily scrutinised tender processes and you have our system where fitness is judged on a combination of ability to deliver and political correctness.

MAVERICK

Branko Brkic is editor of Maverick Magazine
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Political correctness is a form of cancer that takes over any system it touches. It lives only to grow. Introduce it into the tender system and soon BEE requirements are favoured above everything else, including actually being able to get the job done.

And reason why things are like that are simple: Bureaucrats need to keep their jobs.

In the information technology world there used to be a saying: nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. (Today, it is more likely Microsoft.) In South Africa today, award a tender — any tender — to a non-transformed company, even if it delivers a brilliant job, internal controls or the media will kick off a storm of epic proportions. Fingers will be pointed, and jobs may be lost.

On the opposite side, award a tender to a transformed company and you’re safe, even if billions are lost. And bureaucracy exists first and foremost to keep bureaucrats from losing their jobs. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. So everybody plays it safe.

That may all have worked out okay(ish) if our government coffers were bottomless. Sadly they are not, and South Africans are getting somewhat vocal in demanding delivery. Frankly they couldn't give a damn that the house crumbling around them was built the politically correct way. What would make them happy is even if a "politically incorrect" company built the house to spec but was then obliged to spend a significant chunk of the profit made in the process on helping the community out in other ways. But that kind of lateral thinking is too dangerous to even contemplate articulating within the halls of government. Too much tinkering with the dogma. And the careers could be wrecked.

Which brings us back to that worry that comes with Manuel's sudden insight. Anyone who cherishes a political career would never, ever, touch this issue. What are you going to achieve, beyond giving the opposition (internal and otherwise) plenty of ammunition by daring to suggest that tax money should be spent effectively?

Trevor Manuel is on top of his game at the moment, a minister that actually delivers, and he clearly doesn't mind going head-first into the hornet's nest. Laudable. Maybe his speech is a beginning of something bigger, maybe it was planned at the government meetings and given to the country’s favourite minister to announce. If it happens to be the initiative only of his own, I wonder what it does for his future career, though.

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