The Institute of Directors in South Africa (IoDSA) slammed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s lack of rapid action and urgency on the state-owned enterprise (SOE) board appointment process, in a statement yesterday.
The IoDSA also promotes corporate governance in South Africa.
The statement comes in the wake of the president’s address to South Africa on Sunday night.
IoDSA CEO Parmi Natesan said in his long-awaited plan to address the Zondo Commission’s recommendations, the president has set unnecessarily long timelines for the establishment of better processes for selecting board members for SOEs.
“The Zondo Commission quite rightly found that the appointment and removal of board members and senior executives are being manipulated to facilitate state capture. This is an issue that the IoDSA has been highlighting for several years now and, more to the point, we have put in a lot of work with government to provide solutions,” she said.
The Zondo Commission had said appointments to the boards of SOEs must be “justifiable, based on their skills, expertise, experience and knowledge”, and that the state, through the responsible ministers, had signally failed to appoint the “right kind of people to the boards of SOEs”.
“The lengthy timelines indicated in the president’s written response simply do not make sense, especially given the urgency of the matter.”
In his response, the president had indicated the Guide for the Appointment of Persons to Boards and CEOs of State-Owned and State-Controlled Institutions would only be finalised in the 2023/24 financial year.
But the Guide was apparently finalised in early 2019 after input from the IoDSA, Natesan said.
“I can accept that there would be a need to revisit the document in the light of the Zondo Report, but this could be done rapidly. The IoDSA stands ready to work with the Department of Public Service and Administration to get this done, and certainly before the end of the current financial year. The work is largely done, assuming that the recommendations originally made by the IoDSA are in the existing version of the guide. Why the delay?”
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