President Zuma is planning to set up a toll-free hotline for consumers to send their complaints directly to his office. It will be set up for citizens who experience poor service delivery from the government or witness corrupt activities, and feel that they have exhausted other avenues to have their voices heard.

This is potentially a great initiative; however there are a few grey areas and several concerns have been raised about how it will function and how effective it will be. It is not clear when the hotline will be up and running or whether it will have its own investigative capacity. If it does not have an investigative capacity, it will have to refer matters back to government departments or to the police.

A recent article in the Business Day titled Presidency hotline ‘just more of the same’ highlights some of these concerns and seeks expert opinions to address these issues. One of the primary concerns is how the relevant government departments could possibly cope with more cases when they lack the capacity to investigate the cases which they are attending to at the moment.

Derek Luyt, head of media and advocacy at the Public Service Accountability Monitor, states that “the broader issue is perhaps not how effective or ineffective hotlines are, but how seriously government takes the prosecution and disciplining of corrupt and underperforming officials through all channels. If other channels don’t work, why would the public expect hotlines to work?”

getclosure Director Patrick Deale says, “to really be effective, hotlines should be used in conjunction with other systems and be implemented as a safety net rather than as a primary or stand-alone tool to address poor service delivery”.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think the presidency hotline will be a success?