The edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 03 March 2024 and headlined, “The public service should be free of party-political interests.”

The election of President Ramaphosa as the fourteenth
President of the ANC and the fifth President of the republic was with a promise
of a new dawn. The excitement included the prospect of a technocratic
presidency focusing on the nuts and bolts of truncating the slide towards a
crisis and potentially a failed state. His safaris in private sector boards
were touted as the experience capital South Africa would invest its public
power in for five years. The liberation promise in the Constitution was assumed
to have been in the custody of the right hands. 

South Africa might have
overlooked that all the capital forms Ramaphosa commanded would depend on the
executive authority and administrative capability teams he would ultimately
surround himself with. Concerning the executive authority team he could put together,
the members of parliament his party has deployed would be his gross list from
which to select the National Executive. This meant he would be as good as the
sum total of the team he selects or is structurally given. The brute truth is
that the pulse and cadence of efficiency within the state’s organs would depend
on how the executive authority organises the administrative capability of the
state. The executive authority of the state is the most active agency of any
state. The collective habits of those occupying national executive offices
become the values of state administration and, ultimately, the nation. 

The debate on who and how
the public sector is resourced should thus be rescued from being a national
political issue and wrestled back into its safety zone of state efficiency
realm.  Notwithstanding that public service is inherently political, its
organisational arrangements can be as normative as those in which the executive
authority of state organs vests. As a nation, we should be more worried about
who or what quality we have on the shelves when politicians’ prerogative and
arbitrary decisions start searching for public servants. 

Cadre deployment creates a
legitimate criticism that those deployed will be accountable to the party and
not the taxpayer, which, in essence, is the one commissioning the public servant. A casual search of what the ANC mean
or what is meant by deployment will yield a different context. In its foremost
instructive strategy and tactics policy document, the ANC sums up its position
on cadre development as,

“for it to exercise its vanguard role,
the ANC puts a high premium on the involvement of its cadres in all centres of
power. This includes the presence of ANC members and supporters in state
institutions. It includes the involvement of cadres in the intellectual and
ideological terrain to help shape society’s value systems. This requires a cadre policy that
encourages creativity in thought and in practice and eschews rigid dogma. In
this regard, the ANC is responsible for promoting progressive traditions within
the intellectual community… .”

 

For a long time, the ANC
has operated as the Parliament of the People and thus saw itself as the
alternative government for those who were disenfranchised.  Its
relationship with state power has always been that of seeing institutions of
the state as targets of change and transformation. The belief that
only cadres of the ANC can implement its policies has its roots in its
historical posture as the oldest alternative voice of the disenfranchised.
In its role as the architect of the Constitution (which now
defines the legality of the National Democratic Revolution) it has
(arguably) bequeathed to any political party that lays its hands on state
power the right to reinterpret the NDR in terms of how to achieve its objective
of establishing a NDS. In the process, and it would seem, the ANC did
not recalibrate its alternative government claim to meet the demands of the
constitutional and democratic order which obtains.

As a result, the
transition to a post-apartheid democratic order would not have been allowed to
be commandeered by a bureaucracy the ANC, the new governing party, did not
trust. Despite the ANC having been part of the multilateral public
administration and management transformation discourses, as a government in
waiting, which advocated for public service reform programs that derisked the
state from the prerogative arbitrariness of politicians, it took the risky
decision of making public service and administration to be managed politically
through a state department. The South African conditions after 1994 dictated
such a transition, and a transitionocracy that set in was left too long to
develop a political economy whose liabilities include misreading the true
intentions of ‘cadre development’ in its time and space conceptualisation. The
entrenchment of a Public Service Commission in the Constitution remains the
apex indicator that what we institutionally have can never bring public service
stability for as long as its politics are party-political and not
institutional. In hush tones, academics and public affairs scholars are
ready for a consensus establishing a full-house public service commission
accountable to Parliament and the normative force of public service.

The myth that
interests-driven politicians can subjugate their prerogative arbitrariness in favor
of normativity should be debunked. Politics as a vocation survives on interests to make
sense; like water is to fish, so are the interests of politicians to politics.
The character of the South African Constitution is, by design, a
democracy-reinforcing constraint without which the legal character of the
liberation promise in the Constitution will be at risk. This is what has made
principle rather than arbitrary law-making to be instructive to how we are
governed. To the extent that the freely elected representatives of the people
shall govern on their behalf, it will always be beholden to such governance and
not be inconsistent with the Constitution as the supreme law. In this
circumstance, society’s insurance should be calibrated to make the consequences
of public servants acting unlawfully because of political instruction
individually consequential. 

We should insist on the
minimum qualifications for public service employment as a society. Commensurate
with the maturity of politics and the growing regard for people to be
qualified, even as politicians, we should spend time developing standards for
public service commissioning. The red, yellow, and blue cards we devise for
governance should improve the quality of the public service game, regardless of
who the player is. As a minimum to the politics of our democracy, we should
demand control of the normative aspects of the public sector resourcing value
chain. Equally, we should insist on creating space for those we create to
enter the public sector with a commitment to loyally execute the lawful
policies of the government of the day. This control can only be guaranteed if
the Public Service Commission takes charge of the public service as an enabling
institution. 

While race is still the
dominant vector of analysis on most criteria to determine the extent of
transformation, and will be for extended periods, society should develop
dynamic criteria to rescue currently race-disadvantaged competent South
Africans to find space in the public service as a vocation. What should be
expunged from this criterion over time is loyalty to the political party as
criteria. If the argument is that the Constitution represents the victory of
the liberation movement, then lawfulness is what our liberation is about to the
extent that we are constitutional. Save for correcting apartheid-created
demographics, anyone employed by the state will be ‘deployed’ to good societal
use by the Constitution. 

The public service is a
critical indicator of how a society treats and respects its citizens. It
is through the neglect of the public service by society, and more especially
the private sector, whilst it is still strong, that countries end up with a
public service operating like an economic gangster. As an astute
politician, Ramaphosa, by making corruption and state capture his enemies, knew
that nothing rallies the troops like a common enemy. Unfortunately, this was an
enemy, and few of his generals agreed it was the true enemy. As matters are,
South Africa will have new permutations of power after the 2024 elections,
irrespective of one party getting the magic 50% plus to govern. Any triumph
will be hollowed out by the exigencies of taking South Africa into a new
trajectory of statehood and development. The governing party is procuring
“a mandate to be different”, and this might include implementing ‘its
nostalgically defended cadre development policy’ according to the original
playbook they have written for such a game. One of the critical
aspects of the new path will be how the public service is reorganised to have
the capabilities the South African economy and developmental needs expect of it. CUT!!!