Governments may come and go, but the state over which they preside will endure. In a democracy, its staff and institutions will faithfully carry out the lawful instructions of those elected to office, subject to clear sets of rules and ethics that govern their relationship with the population as a whole. The well-being of the latter is, after all, meant to be the ultimate object of the state’s endeavours.

Hence the descriptor “public service”.

According to Stats SA, the national and provincial public services employed around 1,583,022 people. A further 345,639 were employed by municipalities, along with 213,248 people employed by universities, technikons and other state bodies (although not all State-Owned Enterprises). In total, what the statistical authority terms the “government sector” comes in with a workforce of over 2.1 million.

The 2025/26 budget projected the direct costs of the public service – the wage bill, in other words – at R824.3 billion, out of a total R2.6 trillion. This is about a third of the total. Measured against GDP, the wage bill comes in at above 10% – 10.2% in 2023/24, according to a report last year by the Centre for Risk Analysis.

Opening that up a little to include the entirety of the public sector – local government and the those other state institutions – and the wage bill comes in at more than 13% of GDP (13.6% in 2022). Treasury compared this to a selection of 19 other countries, mostly economic heavy hitters like China and the US, and large emerging markets like Brazil and Mexico. Of this sample, South Africa had the third largest commitment, behind only Demark and Iceland. China’s public sector took up 9% of its GDP, and Japan was on 5.5%.

Sizeable

South Africa has long had a sizeable public service (or, prior to 1994, an array of separate services), and they have always had a political inflection. Those employed in it have constituted key constituencies for incumbent governments, and a public service job would typically support a secure middle-class life.

The South African state has always been tasked with implementing in one way or another politically loaded policy that was fiercely supported by some and opposed by others.

This has certainly been the case since 1994. The ANC envisaged the state playing an expressly developmental role – something that produced an intrusive labour relations regime, an extensive system of social grants, and various economic strategies and industrial policy initiatives. But it would (in defiance of the constitutional strictures) be a politicised bureaucracy.

Aside from the obvious opportunities that the public service presented to provide well-paying employment to the ANC’s support base, the party took an explicit decision in the 1990s to “deploy” its “cadres” into offices that were intended to be politically non-aligned.

As Gabriel Crouse points out in a recent paper on South African taxation, the World Bank’s index on government effectiveness (a crude stand-in for the public service, but revealing nonetheless) has seen South Africa undertake one of the most precipitous declines in the world. In 1996, South Africa’s government effectiveness stood at a percentile score of 83; by 2023, it stood at 40.6.  

By way of contrast, Indonesia and Vietnam – two developing countries whose achievements have been eyed by local policy makers – have seen their scores over this period rise from 23.5 to 69.8 and from 33.3 to 56.1 respectively.

A combination of race-coded staff engineering, political preferment, corruption, and a remarkable tolerance for ineptitude mean that much of the public service is simply unable to perform to expectations. Indeed, in some areas, it is worse: the state of many of the country’s municipalities is a testimony to institutional collapse.

Merit

The idea of merit-based appointments was rejected in fact, and sometimes explicitly – as when then MP and later Public Service Commissioner Maria Rantho declared it “imperative” to be rid of merit as a priority in making appointments.

Indeed, Crouse has noted that the effect of state spending (again, a crude measure that takes in more than just the public service) now has a negative multiplier effect on the country’s economy. The more that the state spends, the greater the damage it is inflicting. This is quite extraordinary.

Not even the government pretends this is anything other than a crisis. Hence, the country has transitioned from bold assertions that South Africa was a developmental state (or in a more modest formulation, an aspirant developmental state), to calling it the downgraded “capable state”, and now to “professionalising it”. That 30 years after the transition the official line is that the state needs to be “professionalised” speaks volumes.

Essential

Turning this around is essential for South Africa’s prospects. Not only is an efficient public service essential as an enabler of economic life, it is crucial to making the jurisdiction it serves “liveable”. Those concerned about the factors that are sending talented South Africans towards the exit (or Johannesburgers to Cape Town) should ponder what difference competent administration might mean.

So, what needs to be done? As the IRR has argued in another recent study – In Service of the Public: Reforming South Africa’s Public Administration – this can be split into three courses of action.

The first needs to deal with the political and policy structure of the issue. This means above all halting political meddling in the operations of the public service. Elected politicians may justifiably rely on the public service to implement policies, but the “deployment” of loyalists has created parallel and confused lines of authority that have badly compromised state institutions.

This actually extends beyond cadre deployment, as destructive as that may be (and it goes without saying that this cannot be allowed to continue). Rather, much of the problem lies in the design of the public service, which places significant power in the hands of political office-bearers (ministers and Members of Executive Councils), which – as Ivor Chipkin and Rafael Leite remark – “makes each and every public servant in South Africa a political appointment, potentially.”

To deal with this, it is necessary at a minimum to place some clear space between career public servants and their temporary political bosses. The most obvious solution is to restore the Public Service Commission to the role that was envisaged for it in the early 1990s: as an independent body responsible for the maintenance and operation of the public service.

To great cost, it was neutered and reduced to a research and advisory body. Some progress has been made in this regard, notably in the Public Service Commission Bill, which would establish the independence of the body while conferring on it powers to issue binding directives.

More, of course, would need to be done, and reforms alone will not deal with the issue. As a second course of action, reforms will need to be accompanied by changes to the day-to-day operation of public service. This refers to leadership, management and the maintenance of organisational discipline.

Required

Here, what is required is largely good, strong, results-oriented management. Staff need to be led in their tasks, and each of their workstreams co-ordinated with those of their colleagues. Managers bear first-order responsibility for keeping organisational discipline and ensuring accountability for performance – a function that cannot simply be passed over to human resources departments. This is standard for any successful organisation. In state bodies, where inefficiencies and failures are not tied to market disincentives, the imperatives of proper management can be obscured. Indeed, when state employment is used as a form of patronage, “manager” may have less the connotations of responsibility and more those of status.

The third course of action would involve increasing the capacity of the public service to act as it was intended to. This means a new focus in recruitment and promotion, as well as in the constant upgrading of skills throughout people’s careers.

Key to this is prioritising merit and fitness for purpose. Factors such as political leanings should play no role at all; those such as gender of racial or ethnic origins at most a very minor one. Recruitment and promotion should be dependent on passing appropriate exams to gauge such skills as comprehension and problem-solving, as well as (where necessary) professionally relevant content, such as knowledge of planning or the law.

Sitting and passing this exam would not guarantee employment, but would make one eligible to enter the public service, subject to the availability of a position, performance in interviews, verification of other qualifications and so on.

Attractive

Joining the public service and advancement within it must become a prestige matter, an attractive choice for bright and competent people.

Fundamentally, this calls for both institutional reform and – arguably more importantly – a transformation (to use a hackneyed phrase) of the institutional culture. Is this possible? Yes, and South Africa would not be the first country to attempt it. But all of this would depend on a change (a transformation, again) of the prevailing political approach.

The South African state, and with it, its public service, has often been suborned into the parcelling out of patronage. Society cannot afford this anymore, if ever it could.

Whether the political class of the country is willing to make this change is uncertain, and this stands as the most formidable obstacle to the developmental governance – public service in its truest sense – that South Africa so desperately needs.

This article draws on The IRR’s Blueprint for Growth: In Service of the Public: Reforming South Africa’s Public Administration, co-authored by Terence Corrigan and Sara Gon, published in May. It also draws on The IRR’s Blueprint for Growth: Cut VAT and BEE, authored by Gabriel Crouse.

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.

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Terence Corrigan is the Project Manager at the Institute, where he specialises in work on property rights, as well as land and mining policy. A native of KwaZulu-Natal, he is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). He has held various positions at the IRR, South African Institute of International Affairs, SBP (formerly the Small Business Project) and the Gauteng Legislature – as well as having taught English in Taiwan. He is a regular commentator in the South African media and his interests include African governance, land and agrarian issues, political culture and political thought, corporate governance, enterprise and business policy.