Corporate Governance in the South African Public Agencies: Implications for Oversight and Accountability Mechanisms

Abstract

Government oversight mechanisms are imperative to sustain state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in an emerging economy like South Africa. This chapter explores corporate governance challenges and opportunities and their implications for oversight mechanisms and accountability in the South African SOEs. Corporate governance (CG) can be understood as the principles, rules, and practices in which the organizational systems are governed while also balancing the interests of the organizations and that of stakeholders such as senior managers, executives, customers, stakeholders, and government. CG can be applied as a management tool that serves interests that are neither purely public nor purely private while ensuring their growth and productivity. Governments devote tremendous attention and interest to enterprise risk management since the global economic collapse (ERM). Even though SOEs adopted CG to safeguard their growth path in performance and productivity, they have been observed as yielding negative productivity that is not cushioning the economy in the right direction, while also eliciting gaps in CG and risk management of SOEs. The contents of this chapter include the conceptual and theoretical approaches to CG and challenges in applying CG in an international, African, and local context. This chapter prioritizes the implications of compliance and oversight in the South-African SOEs.