Public service posts must be insulated from political interference
The Constitutional Court ruling that the ANC should hand over to the DA minutes and correspondence pertaining to the work of its deployment committee dating back to 2013 has again focused public attention on how some of the country’s top public servants are appointed. The ruling is an important victory for the DA, especially as it comes mere months ahead of a general election in which the ANC’s deployment policy is set to be one of the hottest topics for debate.
Crucially, depending on what the DA uncovers once the records are handed over, the party hopes to use the minutes to show that President Cyril Ramaphosa is not as innocent in state capture as he portrays himself. As ANC deputy president under Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa chaired the deployment committee from January 2013 to 2018. The period coincided with the state capture project at its most devastating — wreaking havoc in state-owned enterprises, hounding out principled senior civil servants in government departments and replacing them with lackeys of Zuma and his friends, the Guptas.
While Ramaphosa and many of his comrades say they were mostly in the dark about what Zuma and the Guptas were doing and that once they found out — around 2015/16 — they started pushing back, the DA believes that the records may prove the contrary.
What was the extent of the deployment committee’s involvement in the appointment of individuals whose subsequent actions almost broke the back of key public institutions such as the South African Revenue Service, Transnet and Eskom? How much did committee members, including Ramaphosa, know about the motives behind some of the changes the committee was acceding to? If all the records are eventually made public, as per the ruling, we would soon know the full extent of their innocence or complicity. However, as we report elsewhere in this edition, indications from within the
ANC are that it only has records dating back to 2018, a period in which Ramaphosa had been replaced as the committee chair by his then ANC deputy, David Mabuza.
This suggests that another legal battle is looming between the country’s largest political parties. But whatever happens next in the courts, it seems clear that the manner in which the ANC carried out its “cadre deployment” policy left too much room for the manipulation of appointment processes in favour of political interests that had nothing to do with ensuring good governance and the building of a strong public service.
Even the ANC admitted as much, though some of its leaders still insist that without this policy the governing party would not have succeeded in deracialising the upper echelons of the public service, the judiciary and many other public bodies and state institutions that were overwhelmingly controlled by one racial group just 30 years ago.
Perhaps in the transitional period from apartheid to democracy there was some justification for this approach. It would not have been entirely reasonable to leave the important task of creating a new nonracial society in the hands of the people who had been loyal to a racist system. But several decades into democracy and nonracialism, it is clear that public service appointments need to be insulated from political interference.
While elected representatives — a president, minister, premier or mayor — are legally within their rights to bring a core of trusted individuals into office with them, this should be limited to specific roles and should not include all layers of the public service.
As a young democracy it was probably to be expected that our public service would heavily mirror the country’s ruling elite. But our democracy is maturing and, based on the experience of the past decade, requires a professionalised and permanent public service whose members are not beholden to the government of the day.
We may never end up with the British system where the public service is completely independent of the elected administration. But it is in the interests of us all to come up with robust and non-partisan appointment systems that ensure only the best are selected for key positions, without consideration of their political affiliation or allegiance.
It seems clear that cadre deployment left too much room for manipulation