{"id":775413,"date":"2024-06-05T14:46:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-05T12:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=775413"},"modified":"2024-06-06T12:03:02","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:03:02","slug":"why-a-coalition-could-be-good-for-state-owned-companies-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/775413\/why-a-coalition-could-be-good-for-state-owned-companies-in-south-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a coalition could be good for state-owned companies in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The new era of possible coalition politics could actually be good for South Africa&#8217;s state-owned enterprises (SOEs), because it could usher in a culture that prioritises consequence management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is seen to be crucial to maintain and build on progress made in public-private partnerships (PPP), however this all ultimately depends on the final coalition partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the view presented by Yugen Pillay, the Head of Public Sector Assurance at accounting firm group BDO South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;The fundamental root cause of [SOEs being brought to their knees] is mismanagement and a lack of accountability of those&nbsp;entities,&#8221; Pillay <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5ZJoAgcvh_w\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">told Newzroom Afrika<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pillay noted that in the past, policies and decisions crucial to SOEs were able to easily pass through along party lines, without much oversight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This, along a prevalent tendency to overlook wrongdoing or harmful policy decisions if they originated from within the party, were among some of the key issues hurting SOEs as a result of one-party dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Having a diverse array of organisations with their names and reputations tied to these SOEs could bring bring in far more effective consequence management, argues Pillay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Additionally, SOE policies will need to be decided by more of &#8216;give-and-take,&#8217; to make its way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;When we&#8217;ve got a coalition government in place, there&#8217;s [definitely] going to be more oversight,&#8221; and hopefully less government interference in everyday SOE operations, said Pillay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But&#8230; this improvement depends on the coalition partners<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Having said this, Pillay said that much of this is dependent on who the ultimate coalition partner\/s is\/are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among political parties, there are fundamental ideological differences in how they view SOEs should be run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Policy positions from key coalition discussion players range from completely reversing all PPPs to completely nationalise SOEs, to promoting SOE growth through public-private partnerships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pillay hopes that the former does not happen and that the private sector is not left out in the cold. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He said that PPPs minimise the detrimental interference of appointees who are unable to efficiently and ethically handle operational issues within SOEs, which ultimately hollows (and hollowed) them out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He argues that if these pro-nationalisation parties are indeed the preferred partners, they should compromise with this given some of the successes PPPs have had, and rather take a more active role in oversight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business-opinion\/775222\/south-africas-watershed-moment-and-a-very-important-2-weeks\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">South Africa\u2019s \u2018watershed moment\u2019 \u2013 and a very important 2 weeks<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A public sector analysts has outlined how coalition governments could usher in a culture that prioritises consequence management in SOEs&#8230; but this depeends on who is at the table.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":760533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[19986,5193,20001],"class_list":["post-775413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-coalition","tag-soe","tag-state-owned-enterprise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775413"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775663,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775413\/revisions\/775663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/760533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}