Size of Government needs reduction

This is the ninth edition of this weekly blog aimed at suggesting immediately implementable ideas to help South Africa. This Blog was posted to facebook on 27 September 2025.

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Please also share this blog with your friends – so that we can start people thinking and find solutions.

What?

The size of the national cabinet and of the national assembly need to be dramatically reduced.

Why?

1)              Each cabinet member and member of parliament comes with a hefty price tag in non-salary costs. Each one must have extensive security. Each one must have luxurious homes in two cities. Each one must have a staff of assistants. Each one receives free travel and other extensive perks.

2)              The US congress has 435 representatives for around 370 m people, we have 400 for perhaps 60 million people. This is excessive.

3)              The cabinet has grown, not out of necessity for the work that needs doing but as a way of keeping competing factions in the ruling party (and now GNU) happy. We have 32 ministers (the UK a larger country by population has 22).

4)              We do not get enough tax revenue to do the things that government needs to do. We MUST cut the overhead costs so that we can spend more on implementing fixes to everything, but especially our infrastructure.

5)              Government must be as lean and as efficient as possible. Ministers for the most part have very little knowledge of the departments they head when they start. Their role should be just to give a political direction (a line of march) and area expert permanent directors general should run the departments without interference and should not be changed every time the minister is changed. The UK example of a “permanent undersecretary” for each department who remain no matter which political party (or faction thereof) is in power gives important continuity and technical capability.

How?

1)              We must consolidate and limit the number of departments to a maximum of 22 – each with a minister and no deputy ministers.

2)              As far as the national assembly goes, 200 MP’s paid twice as much will cost far less than what we have now. They need to be paid commensurate with the responsibility they carry. If we cut the cabinet to 22, we will have around 8 MP’s for each committee overseeing a department without them doubling up.

Why Not?

1)              Without the focus of a specific minister on lesser areas of government, these areas may be neglected. This may be true, but government is currently neglecting the big areas of its responsibility anyway – can we truly afford the “nice to haves”?

2)              Smaller parties will not be represented in parliament. This is true, but their ideas will find their way into the parties that are and to greater effect.

3)              No political party in the GNU will push for this – politicians are human and the desire for the prestige, power and perks of an MP let alone a cabinet post is huge.

The people will need to demand that government start to cut its cloth to suit the available budget.