A coalition government could help reset public service

Aless than 50% performance by any political party in the 2024 elections will result in coalition government. Opinion polls indicate there might not be an outright winner.

Election outcomes are about which hegemony or ideology will prevail over the resources and distributive power of the state. This hegemony has, post-1994, been in the firm grip of the ANC because it could consistently amass more than half the votes. In a less than 50% performance, the hegemonic power of the ANC will be truncated, as we have seen in the major metropoles.

Democracy is not only the arrangements with which society has agreed to govern itself but a government of, for and by the people. At the heart of any democratic process is the question of political and economic power. It is not just the right to vote but a means through which humanity can guarantee its right to live in dignity, with social justice and freedom. In its purest form, a democracy should enable society to experience it through the ease with which it can change the government of the day. In this respect, South Africa is growing into a benchmark in the developing world of the legitimacy of electoral democracy to change the government.

Focus on the impact of no party achieving 50% has to date been only on the political ramifications. The more significant impact will be how this affects the public service and its support of the administration. When the government changes, a new political network ascends to power; this means configurations of state, political, bureaucratic and economic power will change. The bureaucracy, especially among senior managers, is always the first to feel the heat of political change.

The central national question is what a coalition executive authority should do to benefit the permanent state or a commissioned public service. Besides accepting that in government there will always be two sets of employees — career and political — the coalition executive authority must appreciate that government lacks budget flexibility, and the two sets of employees have multiple employers in all spheres of government and institutions.

The public service, which outlives elected officials’ tenure, is composed of appointed officials whose organ of state status constitutes what a state is. The public service is not the government of the day; it is the state. The institutions making up the public administration system, which embody the power and authority the constitution gives them, depend for their success on the “commissioned competence” in the public service.

Our constitution provides basic values and principles governing public administration. It specifies that “within public administration, there is a public service for the republic ... which must loyally execute the lawful policies of the government of the day”. In the context of no outright winner, a coalition will be the government of the day. The executive and legislative authority will vest in a coalition between the president and parliament. There will be a coalition cabinet, and the prerogative of the president will be curtailed. In the hands of a “South Africa first” cohort of coalition leaders, the country might again emerge with higher-order objectives for society to chase.

A new coalition order would require a bureaucracy that understands the ramifications and lawfulness of the policies it should execute, support and enact, and their effect on society. The public service must have a grasp of the liberation promise the constitution has bequeathed to society. A coalition government could be an opportunity to reset how, as a society, we should be commissioning from among our professionals those who will be a “permanent capable mind of the state” that will “loyally execute the policies of the government of the day”.

The risk, however, is that left to execute authority coalition arrangements, which would naturally perceive or find state bureaucracy distant and unmanageable, the possibility of new policy tsars reversing the gains of public administration reform and stabilisation is real. This might even violate the collaborative government principles of non-encroachment into other state authorities, and the supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law might be a casualty.

✼ Dr Mathebula is the Founder and CEO of the Thinc Foundation based in Tshwane. He is a Public Policy resource expert specialising in Intergovernmental Relations and Public Administration. This article summarises a paper delivered at the SAAPAM conference on the subject

‘Bureaucracy is first to feel the heat of political change’