The level of surprise at the insidious, state-capture-enabling nature of the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, surprises me. It was entirely predictable, 25 years ago.
In the wake of testimony at the Zondo Commission about the role of cadre deployment in state capture, the mainstream media is suddenly full of journalists and commentators who are shocked – shocked! – that the ANC’s deployment policy led to such a dismal outcome.
Yet there shouldn’t be any surprise at all. Today’s endemic corruption, hopelessly underperforming civil service, incompetent management at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and compromised officials even in supposedly independent institutions, has been 25 years in the making.
Granted, some of the shocked, surprised and outraged figures might be too young to remember 1996, when Joel Netshitenzhe wrote a document for the ANC’s Umrabulo publication, entitled ‘The National Democratic Revolution? Is it still on track?’
In it, according to a 2017 paper by Chitwa Twala, he proposed centralising and systematising the ‘deployment’ of ANC cadres to all ‘centres of power’, including the economy, education, sports, arts and the media, so as to secure ANC control and hegemony.
The ANC Deployment Committee was established soon after, under then-president Nelson Mandela.
Good excuse
At first, there was a fairly good excuse for cadre deployment. After all, the civil service was lily-white, as were the boards and management structures of SOEs. Many of these white officials were old-school Nats, who could be expected to resist the implementation of policies imposed by the new, ANC-led government. It was necessary, at least for political appointments, to rapidly deploy people who would be loyal to the new government.
The same argument could be made for affirmative action and black economic empowerment (BEE), which were, at first, remedial interventions that, while far from perfect, were politically necessary to undo the comprehensively racist legacy of apartheid.
All of these policies should have been limited, and should have had sunset clauses, however. One of my early columns as a mainstream opinion writer, in the short-lived Maverick print magazine circa 2007, argued that it was time to ditch BEE, since it was showing signs of diminishing returns and increasing costs. That was 15 years ago.
The ANC’s objective, however, was not merely to redress the racial imbalances of apartheid. If it was, they would have prioritised creating a world-class education system to raise a new generation out of the ignorance apartheid inflicted upon so many of their elders.
They didn’t. They appointed loyal ANC cadres and union members to schools instead, with the result that South Africa’s education system now ranks among the poorest in the world. In addition to the lost struggle-era generation, we now have new generations of which a significant majority are entirely unsuitable for employment, even if the economy had remained free enough to create jobs for them.
Party loyalty
The ANC’s objective with cadre deployment was always to subject all public and many private institutions to the will of the party. ‘We must have a clear understanding of the system of supervision and decision-direction … to ensure that our army of cadres discharge their responsibilities in accordance with decisions which the movement has made,’ wrote Netshitenzhe.
It is now clear that cadre deployment did not end with the typical political appointments that any ruling party would want to make. It extended to the judiciary, to nominally-independent Chapter 9 institutions, to the diplomatic corps, to the SOEs, and all the way down the ranks of management in the civil service.
Deployment was based not on competency, but on party loyalty. As Ndwakhulu Tshishonga found in a 2014 paper, ‘Cadre deployment policy was adopted by the ruling party (African National Congress) as a model to strategically place loyal party members in positions to execute policy and programme imperatives of the government. While the deployment of party cadres is a noble move, it often does not guarantee delivery to both party and public expectations, unless personnel is selected based on their capability and capacity regarding the requirements of the position at hand. Cadre deployment solely based on trust, as this paper finds, has contributed to multiple problems that range from lack of planning and ineffective leadership to underspending and mismanagement of financial resources.’
Cadre deployment is a core element of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of government, where cadres are considered capable militant revolutionaries, trained to carry out the goals of the Party and inculcate obedience to Party rules. It was, as a consequence, also a key part of the National Democratic Revolution, the socialist policy to which the ANC hews.
Unconstitutional
Even at this point, the original cadre deployment system violates the Constitution, which requires that public sector appointments are conducted by an independent Public Service Commission, should promote a high standard of professional ethics, efficient, economic and effective use of resources, as well as accountability, and, most importantly, that no employee of the public service may be favoured or prejudiced only because that person supports a particular political party or cause.
Of course, it doesn’t end there, as we all now know. The deployment principle also enables a system of political patronage, by which the ruling party is able to use jobs and contracts to reward loyal party cadres and voters, and so retain power for itself.
This is why everyone within the Deployment Committee’s orbit, from civil servants to SOE directors and managers, from ambassadors to judges, are motivated not to work in the interest of the people, nor even in the interest of the government. They’re all required to put the party first, as Netshitenzhe proposed.
Their ability is neither here nor there. All that counts is party loyalty.
Most corrosively, perhaps, cadre deployment enables corruption. If all appointments are made on the basis of political patronage, with the ANC Deployment Committee overseeing the top half of the hierarchy, and those deployees overseeing the rest, and even the nominally independent institutions captured, one must rely on the honesty and ethics of every individual so appointed. That is, of course, absurd.
It is equally absurd to expect civil servants to blow the whistle on corruption, because their own jobs depend on the goodwill of more senior political deployees.
This, plus a system of preferential procurement, is why government routinely overpays for literally everything from office supplies to power stations. This is why government contracts are worth many times more than similar, private sector contracts.
The entire purpose of political control of a government department or a local municipality becomes the ability to appoint a procurement manager who is willing to direct contracts to the right friends, family and business cronies.
There is a vast network of middlemen, whose job is nothing other than having the right BEE profile, and marking up goods and services sold to the government. The only thing that distinguished the Zuma administration from its predecessors was the brazenness with which this gangster’s paradise was pursued.
ANC identity
This culture of personal enrichment, corruption and patronage permeates everything the ANC is and does. It is at the core of their ideology. It is their identity.
There is no possibility of reform. Many naïve journalists believed Cyril Ramaphosa when he took office in 2018 and promised he would act against corruption. (I didn’t.) But why would he? His own job was to put the party first, and the party could not survive a wholesale purge of corrupt leaders and appointees.
Now that Zondo fingered the very Deployment Committee which Ramaphosa chaired under Zuma as a major cause of state capture, our glorious leader’s only defence is that minutes weren’t kept when he was in charge.
‘The dog ate my homework.’ What is he, 12?
Are we to believe that someone who was the ANC’s chief negotiator during Codesa, and made billions in personal wealth purely from being a loyal, well-connected ANC cadre to win BEE deals, board seats and sweetheart contracts, is incapable of having minutes taken? For years?
He, and other ANC officials, have reportedly lied under oath to protect the ANC Deployment Committee. And why would anyone expect any different? They know where their bread is buttered, and it’s not in a meritocracy.
The end of the Deployment Committee means the end of the vast patronage network, and the end of the extensive control the ANC has over the state and the economy. The ANC, and the grifters that comprise it, can never give this power up.
And all this, from patronage to corruption to state capture, was entirely predictable, 25 years ago, when the Deployment Committee was first established.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.