aiden choles

I have a growing sense that as a nation, South Africa is heading towards a knife edge. In just a few months Zuma goes to trail (in which the prosecutors are calling over 200 witnesses). A few months thereafter, we go to the polls to vote for a new president (during which the president-elect will still be standing trial for corruption). As recipes go, this does not bode well for a peaceful transition between power regimes.  read more »

Motivate staff, put in place better technology and improve facilities.

This is the solution our new director general of the Department of Home Affairs is placing his bets on in trying to root out corruption in the department. Sounds awfully simplistic to me! Are the efforts of "motivating staff, putting in place better technology and improving facilitates" not hygiene factors in making any organisation effective? Who says they are the solution to rooting out corruption?

How does this bloke know that this ploy will work? It sounds to me like he's under pressure to assert a strategy to deal with a heavily complex issue and has resorted to a simplistic answer that has sounded good in previous contexts. If only he had a way of exploring the problem to some degree of depth to see what emergent solutions might come about. Look, his solutions might be the right ones, but if he has not explored the context of the problem sufficiently, he runs the very real risk of applying "best practice" to a problems that it as averse to best practice as HIV/AIDS is averse to prevention.