Nobody is as good at going socialist as the EFF, and they are back at it again.
Now that Julius Malema is no longer the loudest populist in the room, and its electoral relevance is shrinking by the day, the EFF has gone back to a tried and tested socialist move: when your message starts slipping, promise to hire half the country, and call it freedom.
That is the backdrop to the Insourcing Bill which the EFF has introduced to Parliament this week. The Bill lets the EFF wave a bright ideological flag (“bring every cleaner and security guard on to the government payroll”) while painting rivals as captives of “white-monopoly-capital” outsourcing. It is not a realistic reform, but a bid for renewed relevance in a crowded protest market where the EFF’s relevance is ever-shrinking.
Government’s wage bill already eats nearly a third of all consolidated expenditure. The National Treasury puts compensation of employees at 31.9% of the budget for 2025/26. The Bill’s memorandum blithely claims that “it is not anticipated that there will be additional organisation and personnel implications”. That is fantasy. Even if only half the targeted services were insourced, the head-count (and long-term pension liability) would climb steeply. When Nelson Mandela Bay tried something similar in 2018, the city found itself paying “millions of rand more”, and still had to rely on private firms because it lacked enough guards.
Moreover, another classic socialist move is to correctly identify the root cause of the problem but offer a completely incorrect and impractical solution. The preamble of this matter is the fight about tender rigging and worker exploitation. But swapping one set of gatekeepers (private contractors) for another (state HR managers) doesn’t magically wish corruption away. A bloated, centralised hiring scheme is just as vulnerable to cadre deployment and ghost employees. South Africa has an existing culture of unaccountability that needs addressing. This policy only creates the possibility to exacerbate this culture.
What does the Bill explicitly say?
Section 2 of the bill outlines it in black and white. Every organ of state must directly employ people to provide the following services:
- security,
- cleaning,
- gardening,
- “general maintenance” (from patching a roof to refurbishing a provincial hospital),
- catering,
- auditing,
- transport,
- all information-technology support,
- administration,
- health-care‐related services—
- and anything else the minister feels like adding later.
Clause 5 of the Act makes insourcing the default setting. You may only outsource after proving that no existing employee can fulfill the job description, and even then, a contractor must train a government worker to replace himself. By allowing the minister to add “any other services” deemed necessary at will, the Bill invites mission-creep and patronage. Today it is cleaners; tomorrow it could be legal services or media buying, which will all fall under the purview of the state. Each new function expands the pool of posts to be filled. This is handy if your movement prizes cadre loyalists over competence.
Think about what “everything from IT to catering” means in practice in South Africa. SARS would have to run its own data centres, but also its own canteen. A rural municipality with a single HR clerk would become the legal employer of every security guard at the local clinic – not exactly a model for success. National Treasury would inherit the night-shift cleaners—plus their sick-leave admin, pension liabilities and CCMA disputes.
The state already struggles to buy printer paper on time. Now picture it juggling uniforms for 80 000 security guards, arranging chef shifts at every prison kitchen and running on-call support for thousands of legacy software systems. That is a recipe for slower, not better, service.
Collateral damage to small business
Roughly 60 000 people work for black-owned SMEs that are contracted to clean schools, patrol libraries or maintain municipal gardens. Cancel those contracts and the firms fold overnight, killing one of the few entry points for township entrepreneurs while shifting the wage bill on to taxpayers. The EFF calls it “worker liberation”; for many contractors it will look like redundancy with a different pay-master, one who has a questionable record at best of effective management.
The Bill recognises that the state often lacks in-house expertise and therefore forces any outsourced contractor to train a government employee, with training worth a prescribed share of the contract value. This sounds neat (to socialists at least), but in practice those clauses are hard to police and easy to game. Municipal examples show why: Johannesburg’s 2018 insourcing of 2 800 security guards raised salaries by 50% and won applause for dignity, yet officials admitted the move only “contained” costs, it didn’t cut them. Tshwane now boasts that insourcing construction services “will reduce expenditure”, but the city also fights chronic cash-flow woes and unpaid wage bills.
The fatal conceit of socialist thinking
All of this being said, this bill will not become law. Even in our volatile politics, the EFF’s proposals rarely get further than parliamentary theatre designed to boost EFF poll numbers. But the very fact that the party is still peddling this fantasy is worth exploring. because it says something deeper about socialism’s stubborn hold on the imagination of the political elite, particularly in South Africa.
Socialists consistently misunderstand the basic architecture of human institutions and the nature of implementing policy practically. They insist the state can—and should—control almost everything, and yet the state consistently proves it can barely control itself. The EFF’s bill offers a perfect snapshot of this delusion: an inability (or unwillingness) to grasp the practical realities of human nature, incentives, and bureaucracy.
The proposal identifies genuine wrongs (corruption, worker exploitation, tender abuse) but ignores the root cause: a state too big, too opaque, too corrupt and too inept. The socialist instinct is to see every problem as evidence the state isn’t big enough and doesn’t have enough control over its citizens, never mind that our bloated public sector struggles to run basic services without collapsing under the weight of mismanagement. Socialists ignore reality, double down on ideology, and then go on to call it virtue without thinking of the real-life consequences that flow from their ideology .
What’s behind this impulse? Perhaps it’s the enduring seduction of easy answers. It’s always simpler (and more popular) to promise a government job to every unhappy voter than to tackle complicated structural reforms. But at its core it reflects a deeper flaw in socialist thought: a belief that humans can be reshaped by decree, that good intentions trump incentives, and that bureaucracies will magically stop being inefficient just because the right people are in charge.
In truth, this kind of thinking is a form of intellectual vanity, a stubborn refusal to learn from proven history, economics, or fundamental human nature. The Insourcing Bill perfectly captures socialism’s fatal conceit: that the world should bend to our wishes, rather than that we ourselves build practical, lasting solutions for the world as it actually is.
And yet the EFF will keep making these proposals, and true believers will keep applauding them. Socialists are going to be socialist, indeed.
[Image: Pavel Neznanov on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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