Author: Greg Gatherer
The South African state is, by some distance, the country’s largest single employer. It employs more than 1.3-million people, including teachers, nurses, doctors, municipal workers, police officers and defence force members. All too often, the public sector has also been used to cushion the country’s shockingly high unemployment rate. Those employment numbers come with a significant cost too. In the 2021-2022 financial year, the public sector wage bill hit R665.1-billion and is set to rise to R702-billion in 2024-25. Put differently, while the government employs 13% of all workers in the country, it pays 33% of all wages. Of course,…
IT departments, once a relatively small part of any enterprise-scale company, have grown exponentially important over the past few years. Given the expanded role of technology in everything we do, that growth makes sense. But it comes at a cost. According to Gartner, Global IT spend is on track to hit US$4.5-trillion this year, up 5.1% from 2021. South Africa isn’t immune to those spending patterns either. In 2021, the local market saw 5.2% growth and was valued at US$12.78-billion. That does not, however, mean that IT departments have everything their own way or that they don’t face wide-scale pressures.…
The system is down. It’s a phrase that’s so common in the South African lexicon that it tends to elicit eye-rolls and frustrated sighs amongst anyone trying to get service out of a department in South Africa’s public sector. You might even hear a few people mutter “typical” under their breath as they either walk away from the queue or settle in as they wait for the system to come back online. Based on those experiences, you’d anticipate that South Africa’s public sector lags behind when it comes to digital transformation. That perception is created when vital pieces of online…
There can be little doubt that the past two years have been among the most challenging South African insurers have ever faced. The business closures and loss claims as a result of the hard lockdown in early 2020 came as a seismic shock. Since then, death claims have spiraled, quadrupling during the third wave of the pandemic. It’s not as if there weren’t challenges prior to the pandemic either. The industry was already grappling with how it might have to reimagine itself in the wake of increased weather claims as a result of climate change. Additionally, traditional insurers are facing…