A bureaucracy is the mind of the state. It thinks, analyses, and implements the political program of the government. Once political objectives are translated into public policy, it is a bureaucracy that follows through with financing, staffing, devising work procedures, and ultimately monitoring and evaluating progress. This is the work no politician can perform, notwithstanding how intelligent or innovative they are. 

The much talked about or sloganeered about capable state is essentially about what a bureaucracy does in a state. When all else is failing in a state, it is only until a bureaucracy, which is the front and last line of delivery, has collapsed that we can start to have imaginations of a failed state. Only when the command and control of those that make up the human side of the service delivery army in a society collapses can the state follow suit. 

With all the brilliant brains in a Cabinet, state-owned boards, or any other executive or accounting authority centre, if what is processed for decision or policy making is mediocre, so will the entire public service. Besides the executive authority on top of the public service system, there is the administrative authority and bureaucratic discretion system, which defines the efficiency of governance. If those managing the public transport system are not efficient in how on time the trains and buses are, the entire population will be late for practically all that defines the gross national product of that country. Minute as the detail of time management can be, it is a critical thread that connects and defines the rest of the human productivity cycle. 

At the inception of a post-apartheid government, and for noble reasons of dealing with the public service demographics, the governing ANC established a dispensation that impacted the principle of ‘rising through the ranks in South Africa’s post-apartheid bureaucracy. Bureaucracy sustaining and maintenance systems such as work-study divisions in organs of state were closed. The macro-organisation of the state shifted out of the norms and standards that characterised institutions such as the Public Service Commission as the degree of political prerogative government rose commensurate with the transformation rhetoric. Gatekeeping institutional mechanisms such as the legislated institute of town clerks programmed municipal training centres, institutionalised management training programs like the top down number one to thirteen in teaching, and many other leadership and management progression tools were either discontinued or put permanently in abeyance to accommodate the entry of the new. 

Save for a few departments that are still functional, notably National Treasury, the barriers to entry into the public service were recalibrated to its disadvantage. Whilst the qualification rates are amongst the highest in the world, the South African public service has more personnel who know the what of public service and are very thin on the how. The routine demands of being a bureaucracy, almost to a level of annoyance, yet efficiency-driven, public service have been diffused into the grandiose transitionocratic comfort zones of theorising about the state. 

2024 will be about what government can deliver to its citizens in South Africa. The inefficiencies of public policy implementation have left the boardrooms of public sector organisations. They are now pornographically in power stations, water purification plants, hospital reception areas, public transport train stations, potholes when driving, borders that can seal out organised crime, and many other areas of public infrastructure. Voters need no political convincing about service delivery to make choices. 


The brute reality of ESKOM load shedding and the encroaching water shedding will be the most immediate in the public memory of the government service delivery track record in 2024. If cadre deployment was indeed an investment in “a sure-footed bureaucracy, chosen purely based on merit, rigorously trained, and ideologically vetted- to implement and execute, free of harassment (political or otherwise)” process, the period between 2022 December and the 2024 election date, is a return on investment time for the ANC. 

The deep, diffuse, and protracted democratic recession in South Africa finds itself, procures for higher efficiencies in the bureaucracy that government needs no new policies but a public service rewired to think of service more than anything else. The extent to which corruption has developed its political economy and value chains is what only a committed bureaucracy staffed with the leader of society-minded South Africans can do. The ANC, as an embodiment of what a democracy can be, after years of colonial and apartheid rule, has suffered substantial reputational losses; only a recovery in how it starts to deliver services will rescue it from losing political power. The democratic prospects it had facilitated in the subcontinent have risen and fallen in decades past. In fact, the ANC, an arguable nexus of all political life in South Africa, now faces a formidable new problem; the stability of the democratic order it is building is at risk.