GEORGE NEWS - One of South Africa's biggest downfalls is a vast leadership vacuum in government. 

Many governments around the world would not tolerate the non-performance we have here. This is according to Dr Roy Marcus, design thinking specialist and executive director at The Collaboratory.

Speaking at the Garden Route Environmental Forum's Climate Change and Environmental Management Indaba at the Nelson Mandela University George Campus on 27 June, Marcus explained SA's biggest failure since 1994 was the fact that the monitoring system whereby people in senior positions, such as ministers and senior officials in government, were meant to be monitored in the same way the private sector does, was never put in place. 

He said there was also meant to be strict criteria for the appointment of officials at provincial and national level to ensure they were experts in their fields.

Unfortunately, Marcus said, we've never had that. "Until you have a process whereby people are assessed in terms of meeting certain criteria and objectives, you are never going to get performance," he stated.

Marcus said people got away with non-performance because they are not being monitored, nor are they given performance criteria against which they can be assessed.

He reiterated that people appointed as ministers need to have knowledge of the field in which they are appointed, and that there needs to be a set of criteria to govern performance.

"If you are appointed minister of finance, number one: you had better actually understand finance! How did we get to a stage in South Africa where we had a budget 3.0? It's unacceptable. It means either the minister was making decisions on his own, or he's got a whole group of incompetent people in the finance department - which we know isn't true," Marcus said.

Answering his own question, he said we ended up with three budgets due to the absence of strict criteria to outline what the country's financial objectives were, and then ensuring that those are reflected in the budget. "And so it's a performance issue, and that brings us back to the leadership vacuum in South Africa."

A wicked problem is a social or cultural issue that is difficult or impossible to solve due to its complex, interconnected nature and lack of clear definition or solution. These problems often have multiple stakeholders with conflicting values and perspectives, making it challenging to reach consensus.

Furthermore, wicked problems lack a definitive formulation and a clear stopping rule, meaning there's no single point where the problem is considered solved.

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