Dear Michele,

Thank you very much for your question to the minister regarding unqualified government officials. I must say that the reaction in the media shows that this problem is of national importance and that it is not a new phenomenon.

I was wondering if you could also ask how many unqualified officials or cadres are employed in state-owned enterprises? I worked for more than ten years at the CSIR and have seen how cadres with qualifications are employed by the council who are incompetent in research and innovation. Said differently, they are often appointed as managers, but since they have either no or only a rudimentary knowledge of research and innovation processes, their decisions often leads to misallocation of research funding, the development of already existing research projects (in other words, they copy-cat initiatives and then describe these as ground breaking) or don't do enough oversight of projects and so much so that research projects often run at a loss. These losses can be in the millions depending on the size of the project and often involve Parliamentary Grant funding.

Kind regards,

Prof. Richard Meissner