Politics outweighs performance at CIPC
Former head of companies authority says minister’s siding with labour made her job impossible
ASTRID Ludin, the erstwhile commissioner of the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC), says the real issue around her effective dismissal from the organisation is that “the government is not prioritising service delivery”.
Ludin, who was brought in by Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies in 2011 to turn the then barely functional organisation around, did an “excellent job” according to the department’s director-general, Lionel October.
But Ludin resigned this week after the department issued a notice of suspension against her, citing a forensic report that said she had infringed the Public Finance Management Act.
She says a symptom of the government’s failure to prioritise service delivery is Davies’s lack of support for her and her management team at the CIPC against the unlawful behaviour of unions.
Ludin, who in her four years at the commission acquired a reputation in the business community of being, in the words of one company owner, “honest, professional and formidable”, says her supposed infringements of the act were administrative, technical and necessary. In no way would they have led to her suspension unless there were other agendas at work.
“I made decisions when I needed to make those decisions on the basis of the information that I had, and I believed that everything was above board,” she says.
“Nobody benefited in any way, the auditor-general didn’t detect any irregularities.”
October confirmed that her would-be suspension was not because of any corruption on her part, but because of noncompliance with technical procedures and processes.
Ludin says she believes her attempts to root out corruption and achieve a more efficient, paperless operation turned the powerful National Education Health and Allied Workers Union against her.
Instead of supporting her, she says, Davies took the side of the union. Eventually she resigned, because without his support, she couldn’t carry out her mandate.
“I was given a task, I did my best, I don’t have the support of the minister any more, so I cannot continue with that task.”
Davies said this week it was never his intention to back one side. But Ludin paints a very different picture.
Davies was overseas this week. This apparently meant he was unavailable to answer questions — although it did not stop him from firing off a list of damaging allegations about Ludin.
Under her leadership, the commission was “racked by instability”, he said.
Ludin says Davies exacerbated — if not actively encouraged — this instability by siding with Nehawu.
“There were two periods of instability, both driven by the union and the minister engaging with them,” she says. “The union was acting unlawfully and all the complaints they made, they did not submit to us but to the minister.”
The instability that Davies blames on her was caused by the engagement of his department with the union, says Ludin. Indeed, a three-month period of unlawful union activity that took place last year began just one week after the union met the minister.
“It’s fine for the minister and department to engage with the union — but they need to be careful that they engage equally with management. This was definitely not my sense of what they were doing,” she says.
“The danger going forward is that the unions take this as a licence to intimidate and disrupt.”
In his response, Davies accused Ludin of failing to take employees with her in her drive to modernise CIPC.
She rejects that. “We went through a process for two years, fully outlining what the future of the CIPC would look like,” she says. “All of that was done in close consultation with organised labour and staff.”
Davies’s own department reviewed the entire process, she adds.
“I didn’t get any feedback indicating there was any unhappiness with that process.”
Another accusation Davies levelled at her is that she supposedly lacks personal management skills.
This accusation, she says, is something that is “often levelled against women in leadership positions”.
To the extent that corruption feeds on inefficiency, it is easy to see how Ludin’s attempts to make the CIPC more efficient and cut down on delays in issuing registration certificates, for instance, might have offended powerful forces with a vested interest in the old order.
“There are a lot of vested interests because there are a lot of people outside the organisation who profit from providing intermediary services,” she says.
“People make quite a lot of money out of this. They charge R3 000 for a company registration that we charge R175 for. So there are people who make a good living out of intermediation.”
She thinks “disgruntlement” about the modernisation process and promotions could also be involved. For instance, over a three-month period last year, the digitisation process was accelerated, which meant that those intermediaries were threatened.
“We took paper out. We completely transformed the work environment,” she says.
Crucially, no jobs were lost and everyone received a minimum real salary increase of 5%. Perhaps some of the CIPC staff may have felt they deserved more, but Ludin says that none of this sufficiently explains “what underlies the union activity” that may or may not be behind her fall.
The danger is that the unions take this as a licence to intimidate and disrupt