Puff of cannabis for state tranceformation

There’s been a global shift in attitudes on the use of marijuana over the past decade. Incoming US president Joe Biden even pledged to support federal decriminalisation. Rumours in Pretoria suggest President Cyril Ramaphosa has given the green light to consuming marijuana to advance intragovernmental organisational change.

Public service & administration minister Senzo Mchunu will later this year reportedly unveil an initiative at the 20th annual conference of the SA Association of Public Administration and Management in Sun City.

Widely accepted benefits of consuming cannabis include the managing of epileptic seizures, lower blood pressure and relief from posttraumatic stress disorder. In Switzerland, a pioneer in using marijuana for therapeutic purposes, the drug has reduced suicide in prisons by up to 10%. Little wonder, then, that Mchunu believes marijuana could help reform of SA’s troubled public service.

Three potential benefits have been isolated by a team at the Public Service Commission. First, a senior researcher has revealed that heavy marijuana use is effective for inducting new recruits. “We take bright young people from the best universities in SA,” she said. “It takes years to break down their moral intuitions and intellectual capabilities so they can function effectively in national government departments.”

Studies show daily cannabis use as part of the National

School of Government’s “inboarding and induction programme”, could dramatically reduce “acclimatisation” times.

A second benefit of routine cannabis ingestion concerns stalled pay talks. Journalists detected the first signs of the new approach late in April, when Mchunu called on citizens to suggest solutions to the impasse. Lying on a yoga mat, he observed that “there can be no government without citizens ... They are an important component. We have to get them on board.” The Public Servants Association reportedly said: “That’s fine with us, bru.”

A third advantage of mandatory cannabis consumption concerns Ramaphosa’s promise to remove incompetent cabinet ministers and unnecessary

bureaucracy. “This poses a threat to the very existence of government,” one expert paper under peer review has said.

Building on research from scientists at the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, a presidency team has finalised a confidential “protocol for the systematic application of marijuana in national strategic planning”.

“We discovered that PowerPoint presentations by public service & administration officials induce a trance-like state in those watching them, ” a management consultant revealed. “It is suboptimal to engage with the department without a prior pharmacological modality.”

An organogram of the government machine, reportedly kept under wraps in the Union Buildings basement, has been used to try out the new approach. “The president couldn’t make any sense of it to start with,” an intern said. “But once he had a smoke he decided to blur the presidency and Treasury together.”

Meanwhile, appropriate medication has enabled senior strategy advisers to understand for the first time what the “cabinet cluster system” means.

“The department of public service & administration, the department of co-operative governance, and department of public enterprises are just coordinating departments,” they said. “After a few nice cookies, we realised the whole governance cluster is just lots of people trying to co-ordinate each other.”

Sceptics say the government may find it hard to push through a reform agenda while under the influence of marijuana. But a senior government adviser pointed to a policy document pushed through the cabinet in 2005, saying: “It is called the framework for managing joint programmes in the public service. This is exactly what we all need right now. We will try to find it tomorrow.”