The public service is a reality in our lives, but one that we often find opaque and incomprehensible.
The public service is a reality in our lives, but one that we often find opaque and incomprehensible. The conduct of politicians naturally attracts attention and stirs emotions. In a democratic system, politicians try to foster a relationship with the public. We can, in principle, vote the rascals out. The public service and those who staff it, by contrast, tend to be seen as a homogenised, depersonalised “system”. There is something almost mechanical about this conception. Not much we can do about them. While we interact far more with public servants than we do with politicians, they do not capture our imagination in anything like the same manner.
So, when, on 1 April, President Ramaphosa signed into law the Public Service Amendment Act, it was barely noticed: a big oversight, given the stakes on the table.
The public service refers to the staff of the official institutions that constitute the state. Politicians come and go and are inherently temporary incumbents in their positions. Much the same applies to the political parties from which they come. The state, by contrast, is meant to endure; it is the machinery that facilitates societal life in a large, complex modern community. This is so for all but principled anarchists, for even the most libertarian among us would see a role for the state in, say, protecting people and property. More generally, effective, efficient and predictable administration is a necessary foundation for the activity that makes for a growing economy.
The argument hardly needs to be made that efficient administration has eluded South Africa. Concerns about the condition and capabilities of the South African state have been a recurrent theme in diagnoses of the country’s malaise for years. Indeed, this stretches back to the “skills shortages” and “capacity constraints” identified in the 1990s, through to the more systematic analyses of the African Peer Review Mechanism report in 2007, the National Development Plan in 2013, and the Harvard Growth Lab’s Growth Through Inclusion in South Africa in 2023. Indeed, that latter identified two key brakes on South Africa’s growth prospects, “collapsing” state capacity and the spatial exclusion of millions of people – the latter being impossible to address without resolving the former.
Perhaps nothing illustrates the crisis better than official discourse. Two decades ago, the talk was all of South Africa as a “developmental state”, sometimes baldly declaring this to be an objective descriptor of things as they existed. Now, there is a far more limited aspiration to build a “capable state”. A key initiative here is the professionalisation drive, outlined in a 2022 document, A National Framework towards the Professionalism of the Public Service. That it used the phrasing it did – “towards the professionalisation”, not “upgrading”, or the “enhancement of professionalisation” or even the “reprofessionalisation” of the public service – is simultaneously an acknowledgment of and an indictment on the dire state of things.
“Based on merit”
While the Framework sets out a range of interventions, the gist is captured in the foreword by President Ramaphosa. The framework, he said, “aims to build a state that better serves our people, that is insulated from undue political interference and where appointments are made based on merit.”
Merit was, sadly, never the concern it should have been. One might be forgiven for concluding that it was not much of a concern at all. As the late Maria Rantho, then a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress, said: “It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants.” She went on to serve on the Public Service Commission, her advice evidently having been heeded.
The dismissal of the importance of merit – something Rantho was hardly alone in advocating – was generally interpreted as a reference to ensuring demographic transformation and ensuring that the public service mirrored the racial and gender makeup of society. This was an easy metric to measure (government reports go into obsessive detail about it), and one with a certain rough intuitive logic behind it.
However, the “transformation” agenda always went beyond this. South Africa’s Constitution clearly stated that the public service was to be a professional, career-oriented body, that it was to function impartially, and would be obliged to implement faithfully the policies of the incumbent government.
But hardly was the ink dry on the country’s foundational document, then these provisions at least were effectively discarded. “Transformation of the state,” an ANC party document from 1998 expounded, “entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the NLM [National Liberation Movement] over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.” While this was followed by some unconvincing boilerplate about how this didn’t mean abandoning non-partisanship, that was clearly the envisaged outcome. Ascribe this to the ANC’s worldview, that as an arbiter of historical inevitability and elevated politico-moral consciousness, its hegemony was an objective good. Transformation meant politicisation.
This was paired with the ANC’s wholly counter-constitutional programme of cadre deployment, in terms of which a party committee would assign particular “cadres” to positions in the state and society at large. As revelations in recent years have shown, the ANC’s party deployment committee was even receiving and considering applications for positions.
Ultimate authority
This was further enabled by an under-appreciated structural reality: in terms of the Public Service Act of 1994, political principals – ministers and members of provincial executive committees – were accorded ultimate authority for human resource matters. Note that this was one of the first measures taken following the transitional elections, predating by a considerable margin the country’s final constitution. According to a 2023 report by the New South Institute (NSI), “in effect, the Public Service Act makes each and every public servant in South Africa a political appointment, potentially.” The NSI, incidentally, was a prime mover behind the recently signed Act.
Inevitably, this meant that positions in the public service were used for patronage, that the necessity of technical and managerial know-how did not receive due acknowledgement, and that political loyalties superseded a sense of responsibility to the country as a whole.
As the ANC fractured, this meant that the dysfunctional internal politics of the party corroded the functioning of the state, something on display during the 2021 riots. (The official report noted that ANC infighting had become a threat to the stability of the country).
A toxic culture permeated much of the state. The political utility of various constituencies overwhelmed the perceived need to deal with their shortcomings, a matter of grave importance in the education sphere.
And while the ANC may have seen itself as embodying a unique form of ideological discipline, in reality, it rapidly became a vehicle for corruption. Political patronage meant access to wealth of dubious provenance. Here – before the Gupta clan or Bosasa or the looting of South Africa’s state-owned enterprises were topics of public discussion – was the original state capture.
In essence, party-political culture and institutional design have made for a very damaging combination.
This is where the new Act comes in. It amends the PSA to recognise a clear distinction between political and administrative offices. Senior public servants are not permitted to hold office in political parties. Arguably more importantly, it removes from political office-holders their control over the recruitment of public servants and other operational matters. These are now vested in heads of department.
Hardly sexy, headline-grabbing stuff
This is hardly sexy, headline-grabbing stuff. The wording or even the details of legislation – aside, sometimes, from the big, evocative stuff like the Expropriation Act – seldom finds much of an audience with the public. But in this instance, we’d all be well advised to take note.
If the original PSA potentially made every public servant a political appointee, the amendment could potentially free every public servant from the intrusive influence of politics. It is a step change in the conception of the management of South Africa’s public service, holding out the possibility of creating – for they still need to be created – a set of institutions founded on professional ethics, meritocratic career progression, and sound internal performance and management cultures.
But as important as the Act is, it is unlikely to be sufficient for the reset that South Africa requires.
In the week that the president signed the Act, I counted three intriguing media stories that underlined the nature and scale of the problem. One, a piece in the Daily Maverick by Marianne Thamm, related to testimony before the Khampepe Commission by Menzi Simelane, controversial former head of the National Prosecuting Authority. He described how senior public servants who had come from the ANC saw things through an inherently party-political lens. Their understanding of authority and responsibility was drawn from their political background, rather than from their new institutional responsibilities, even to the extent of their preferring Struggle-era designations for themselves, such as Commissar and Commander. The exercise of their powers in a manner that might be harmful to the ANC, or otherwise outside the party’s chain of command, was deemed unthinkable.
Also in the Daily Maverick was a report by Rebecca Davis on a “fightback” against initiatives launched by Minister Siviwe Gwarube within the Department of Basic Education. This was allegedly being conducted by ANC-sympathetic officials, who were briefing ANC members of the corresponding parliamentary committee to supply them with information damaging to the Minister. That such briefings had taken place seems to be accepted as fact. General Bantu Holomisa of the United Democratic Movement pointed out, correctly, in a letter to the Speaker of Parliament and Chair of the Public Service Commission that this was inimical to good parliamentary practice, that it corroded the principle of separation of powers, that it undermined the Government of National Unity, and that it violated a key commitment of the GNU, that the public service needed to be depoliticised.
Severing
The third was a column by Jonny Steinberg in News24 calling for the severing of the “umbilical cord” between the country’s party-political leadership and the police. While the ANC had a well-founded suspicion of the police force (later service) it inherited, the appointment of Jackie Selebi, a long-time ANC activist and close supporter of then President Thabo Mbeki, signalled that it had no intention of doing away with the sort of political control over policing that had been used against it, but rather intended to control and redirect it. Selebi had no prior policing experience, and on Steinberg’s account, instructed his subordinates to use the service to neutralise political opponents. When Mbeki fell to the Zuma ascendency, the model was appropriated by the new power bearers. The consequences for actual policing and for investigating capabilities have been ruinous.
Each of these describes facets of a problem that is likely to outlast the reform of the law. The entrenchment of political operatives and the use of nominally independent state agencies to prosecute political fights is now so much a feature of the public service as it exists that even with a reconfigured legal regime, change in behaviour will be slow and uncertain in coming. Some in the public service are unlikely to see their role as anything other than one designed to serve a party-political objective.
As prominent Africanists have observed across the continent, too often the formal institutions of power serve as mere legitimators for the exercise of real power around informal axes of loyalty.
Impartial and professional administration is a direct threat to the political patronage systems that have become part of the ANC’s strategy for maintaining power, and also to the operations of the criminal organisations that have penetrated the state.
A lot at stake
There is a lot at stake: jobs, money and even the prospects of prosecution. There will be enormous fightback against it, targeting not only those politicians intent on reform, but precisely the sort of public servants who understand the imperatives of setting South Africa’s public administration on a new course.
So, this contest is far from over, and its conclusion far from certain. There is no guarantee that it will in the end produce the depoliticised, professional institutions that South Africa needs. But with a revised legal position, the possibilities for getting there are more favourable than at any point in the last three decades.
[Image: charlesdeluvio on Unsplash]
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