Abstract
Abstract : In recent years, many of South Africa’s State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have been subjected to an immense and devastating castigation in economic and social dialectical discourses. These debates are often waged by socio-economic pundits in academia, civil society, media and Non- Governmental Organisations (NGOs). The criticism of the SOEs is warranted by the misplacement of their organisational goals which are supposed to revolve around the provision of enabling infrastructure for socio-economic advancement of the people of South Africa. In view of the aforementioned realities, South Africa’s SOEs are in the relentless predicament of catastrophic leadership bankruptcy which can be attributed to the derailment of the real purposes of parastatals as catalysts for public value creation. This leadership conundrum has led to the loss of confidence and trust in SOEs’ ability to play their central roles of development and revenue generation to sustain their operations. South Africa’s SOEs are generally known for their financial mismanagement, treasury bailouts, lack of accountability, political cronyism, lack of respect for the rule of law, unstable leadership structures, productivity inefficiencies and thriving impunity culture. All these undesirable institutional complexities emanate from leadership deficiencies that are undoubtedly evident in many SOEs. Thus, this article contends that leadership is one of the major determinants of efficiently performing institutions towards achieving their set objectives. This implies that injudicious leadership arrangements always lead to disastrous consequences that are noticeable in many of South Africa’s SOEs. The current leadership bankruptcy in SOEs undermines government’s objectives that it seeks to achieve through the treasured National Development Plan (NDP). In order to remedy the current leadership insolvency in SOEs, this article concludes that there must be a promotion of meritocratic culture, sound succession plans, pragmatic financial austerity measures, promotion of ethical leadership and adherence to good governance principles and mechanisms. This article is based on a triangulation of a variety of non-empirical study research techniques. The methodological approach entails a desktop analysis by means of a literature study whereby information produced will be scrutinised through a process of intellectual analysis, categorisation, integration, reflection and synthesis in which meanings will be ascribed to the data.