Big man, big cabinet

Is the enlarged South African cabinet, announced by President Jacob Zuma, too big? Perhaps, but not much more than many countries. If South Africa is suffering from cabinet minister inflation, so is the rest of the world.

A glance at the number of cabinet ministers in a range of countries, some in the developed world, some not, some in Africa, some in the East, shows that none have less than 15, the figure for the US, and some have more than South Africa’s.

Uganda 48
Pakistan 44
Zimbabwe 35
South Africa 34
Australia 32
Malaysia 29
Brazil 26
Mauritania 25
Tanzania 25
UK 22
Sweden 21
Italy 21
Mexico 18
US 15
Hungary 15

The list is chosen randomly, and I used information from the CIA website, the only quickly available source I could find. The CIA website lists only ministers, not deputy ministers, so that there may be distortions there. If you include deputy ministers, South Africa’s cabinet numbers 62, which is a lot of people to get around the table.

However, the Aussie cabinet, for example, has 53 people if parliamentary secretaries are included. I don’t know if they are considered part of the cabinet, but they are listed as part of ministries, and include, for instance, the parliamentary secretary for government service delivery.

There is concern about cabinet inflation elsewhere in the world. According to the Jerusalem Post of April 11 Israel had a law, now in abeyance, that limited the cabinet size to 18.

The Post comments about the 30-member Israeli cabinet:

“There’s no firm data on how much our ‘super-size me’ cabinet will cost taxpayers. But just watching such a bloated government around the cabinet table is demoralising. The irony is that in his 1996-99 stint Netanyahu was the last premier to implement the now-abrogated Basic Law that demanded a cabinet of no more than 18 ministers. His successor Ehud Barak established a 25-minister cabinet. The floodgates were completely opened when Ariel Sharon amended the law. Netanyahu knows his economics, so — political exigencies notwithstanding — he really should have done better.”

Prof C Northcote Parkinson, of Parkinson’s Law fame, writing in the mid-1950s observed the average for 60 countries measured was 16, and only centrally planned economies, such as the USSR with 38, had more than 21 members in cabinet.

Parkinson reckoned that when any cabinet exceeds 20 or 21 members a “point of ineffectiveness” is reached, and a smaller, inner cabinet naturally forms to make decisions.

South Africa passed the 20 mark some time ago. Who will really call the shots in the new dispensation?