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SO WE were chatting about a news story over the dinner table recently: R10m lost to copper cable theft annually in Johannesburg; 50 train services disrupted every time cables are stolen; it will cost R57m to replace the metal stripped from the bridges over the M2 in Joburg; and R4.1m for manhole covers, mostly stolen for metal. (Timeslive, October 6 2014)
That’s a truckload of taxpayers’ money, and we taxpayers put our heads together to come up with solutions. None of us has any knowledge of the scrap metal industry, mind you, but between us we came up with a few bright and, I think, innovative suggestions. All we needed was a box that says: ‘Post suggestions here’…
I looked for one. This is what I found:
You can contact your government in the following ways:
Government has a number of help lines and call centres [aarrggh!] through which you can:
- get information about services and programmes
- report problems or make complaints
- provide tip-offs to authorities about fraudulent or criminal activities.
The Presidential Hotline 17737 or president@po.gov.za should be used when all your attempts to get assistance from a government department, province, municipality or state agency have failed. It is not only a complaints line. You can call to share your views or provide solutions to the challenges in your community.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard enough to feel that the presidential hotline is not quite It – not the place to which we’d entrust our brilliant ideas…
Jokes aside, though, I did find myself wondering why our government – and governments around the world – don’t do more to use the Age of Miracle and Wonder, the Communication Era, both to tap brilliant citizen brains and to find out what we the people are thinking and what we really want.
It’s never been easier to put questions out there, has it? Or to pick up data – masses of data, any journalist on trend will tell you it’s the age of big data – and analyse it for info. Or to create your own data – interrogate the data you have, mine it for more insights or add layers of info by piggy-backing questions onto normal services, such as invoices.
Cellphones! Social media! A treasure trove… Ask anyone keeping pace with communication technology how easy it would be to keep your finger on the minute-by-minute pulse of the nation. It’d be like having our communal brain in the palm of your hand…
Or here’s another idea for drawing citizens in as partners in government: forget about your silos and cocoons and secrets and your kneejerk need to protect yourselves. Admit you have a problem and seek the help of real experts.
At the Hvidovre hospital - a major hospital serving the Copenhagen region - the hospital kitchen serves both the hospital staff and the patients. A few years back the head chef, Michael Allerup, was irritated because he could see that much of the food his kitchen was producing ended up in waste containers […] To deal with the situation, he sought expert help and invited a private sector gourmet chef, Rasmus Bo Bojesen, to offer professional advice. (Putting Citizens First: Engagement in Policy and Service Delivery for the 21st Century, EA Lindquist, S Vincent, J Wanna)
Bojesen got admitted as a patient and found (as any patient anywhere in the world could have told you) that hospital food was unappetising, served at times that didn’t suit patients’ appetites, and to top it all, it wasn’t particularly nutritious, either. Using his restaurant and catering experience, he designed and introduced a restaurant-style menu that was not only more appetising and more healthy (it reduced length of stay by an average of a day) but also less costly. Talk about win-win.
There are lots of areas that are major headaches for government where private sector experts could provide valuable insights. My little group of chatterati – and the two bright ideas on cable theft I saw in today’s newspaper – aside, how about a focus group of long-term players in scrap metal, security and relevant industry brainstorming ways to stop the crippling metal theft by making it an unappealing crime – unprofitable or unworkable? (And PS: we’re taxpayers – we’re highly motivated to staunch the money-bleed, aren’t we?)
In some areas, government does seem willing to work with people from the private sector (although often, it does seem to be only a select few; my own experience is that the most interesting and out-there ideas, the ones that take the problem by its four corners, shake it up and turn it inside out and present it from a totally new and useful perspective, don’t come from the gleaming towers of Sandton, they come from the guy who’s the driving force in the community policing forum in Mannenberg or the woman who runs the soup kitchen in Orange Farm).
But in other areas, our government seems rather adversarial and a little defensive. Pity. They could probably solve quite a lot of the practical on-the-ground problems if they sought practical on-the-ground help from we, the practical, on-the-ground people!
- Fin24
Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
That’s a truckload of taxpayers’ money, and we taxpayers put our heads together to come up with solutions. None of us has any knowledge of the scrap metal industry, mind you, but between us we came up with a few bright and, I think, innovative suggestions. All we needed was a box that says: ‘Post suggestions here’…
I looked for one. This is what I found:
You can contact your government in the following ways:
Government has a number of help lines and call centres [aarrggh!] through which you can:
- get information about services and programmes
- report problems or make complaints
- provide tip-offs to authorities about fraudulent or criminal activities.
The Presidential Hotline 17737 or president@po.gov.za should be used when all your attempts to get assistance from a government department, province, municipality or state agency have failed. It is not only a complaints line. You can call to share your views or provide solutions to the challenges in your community.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard enough to feel that the presidential hotline is not quite It – not the place to which we’d entrust our brilliant ideas…
Jokes aside, though, I did find myself wondering why our government – and governments around the world – don’t do more to use the Age of Miracle and Wonder, the Communication Era, both to tap brilliant citizen brains and to find out what we the people are thinking and what we really want.
It’s never been easier to put questions out there, has it? Or to pick up data – masses of data, any journalist on trend will tell you it’s the age of big data – and analyse it for info. Or to create your own data – interrogate the data you have, mine it for more insights or add layers of info by piggy-backing questions onto normal services, such as invoices.
Cellphones! Social media! A treasure trove… Ask anyone keeping pace with communication technology how easy it would be to keep your finger on the minute-by-minute pulse of the nation. It’d be like having our communal brain in the palm of your hand…
Or here’s another idea for drawing citizens in as partners in government: forget about your silos and cocoons and secrets and your kneejerk need to protect yourselves. Admit you have a problem and seek the help of real experts.
At the Hvidovre hospital - a major hospital serving the Copenhagen region - the hospital kitchen serves both the hospital staff and the patients. A few years back the head chef, Michael Allerup, was irritated because he could see that much of the food his kitchen was producing ended up in waste containers […] To deal with the situation, he sought expert help and invited a private sector gourmet chef, Rasmus Bo Bojesen, to offer professional advice. (Putting Citizens First: Engagement in Policy and Service Delivery for the 21st Century, EA Lindquist, S Vincent, J Wanna)
Bojesen got admitted as a patient and found (as any patient anywhere in the world could have told you) that hospital food was unappetising, served at times that didn’t suit patients’ appetites, and to top it all, it wasn’t particularly nutritious, either. Using his restaurant and catering experience, he designed and introduced a restaurant-style menu that was not only more appetising and more healthy (it reduced length of stay by an average of a day) but also less costly. Talk about win-win.
There are lots of areas that are major headaches for government where private sector experts could provide valuable insights. My little group of chatterati – and the two bright ideas on cable theft I saw in today’s newspaper – aside, how about a focus group of long-term players in scrap metal, security and relevant industry brainstorming ways to stop the crippling metal theft by making it an unappealing crime – unprofitable or unworkable? (And PS: we’re taxpayers – we’re highly motivated to staunch the money-bleed, aren’t we?)
In some areas, government does seem willing to work with people from the private sector (although often, it does seem to be only a select few; my own experience is that the most interesting and out-there ideas, the ones that take the problem by its four corners, shake it up and turn it inside out and present it from a totally new and useful perspective, don’t come from the gleaming towers of Sandton, they come from the guy who’s the driving force in the community policing forum in Mannenberg or the woman who runs the soup kitchen in Orange Farm).
But in other areas, our government seems rather adversarial and a little defensive. Pity. They could probably solve quite a lot of the practical on-the-ground problems if they sought practical on-the-ground help from we, the practical, on-the-ground people!
- Fin24
Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
