Profiles – Leadership & Governance · Editorial

By Moakanyi Magazine · June 2026

Outsourcing was sold as efficiency, but it often buys a thinner contract and a worker with no footing. Bring the work back in-house and you change both the cost structure and the employment relationship at once. In June 2026, Minister Mohwasa outlined the benefits of insourcing to parliament, citing job security and improved service quality as the core of the case.

The Argument: Security and Service Together

Insourcing means an organisation employs staff directly rather than contracting the function out. The minister's two claims are linked. A directly employed worker carries the stability of a permanent role rather than the uncertainty of a renewable tender, and an in-house team answers to the institution it serves rather than to a contractor's margin – which is the lever on service quality. For functions like cleaning, security and grounds maintenance, outsourcing has often pushed wages down through competitive tendering while leaving the public body still accountable for the result. Insourcing reframes those roles as part of the institution rather than a cost to be tendered to the floor, and ties the worker's incentive directly to the standard delivered.

The harder questions sit on the other side of the ledger. Absorbing contracted staff onto the public payroll adds a recurring wage and pension cost that a tender keeps off the books, and it narrows the flexibility outsourcing was meant to buy. The fiscal cost and the timeline were not detailed in the dragnet [TK] – and for operators watching the public wage bill, that is the number that decides whether the case holds.

A worker inside the institution answers to its standards, not a contractor's margin.

Made to parliament, the argument now meets the test every reform faces: what it costs to deliver weighed against what it promises to fix.

Sources: allAfrica