Why the state is incapacitated

MUCH is being said about the need to build state capacity. With multiple systemic failures, it’s understandable. The criminal justice system has an appalling record in dealing with gender-based crimes. The public education system is failing generations of pupils. The list goes on. Who or what is to blame?

There are several common answers. There are the nine wasted years of the Zuma-gupta presidency with its stayout-of-jail and parasitic, industrialscale looting. It involved the active dismantling of the SA Revenue Service’s effectiveness, the factional abuse of state intelligence and the re-purposing of strategic state-owned enterprises.

In the Free State, small farmers were swindled out of livelihoods in the infamous Estina dairy project. But the state capturers had other mega cows to milk – the Passenger Rail Agency of SA, Eskom, Transnet and SAA.

This parasitic looting of public resources has contributed significantly to a dysfunctional state.

But is this a complete explanation? Was everything more or less okay before 2009? More importantly, what about the state of the state that made capture on this scale possible?

A second, often related, accusatory finger gets pointed at cadre deployment. It would be foolhardy to ignore the dismal reality of poor appointments influenced by entirely factional agendas, the inexcusable recycling of serial incompetents, not to mention those with repetitive scandals trailing behind them.

True, some accusations against cadre deployment fit in the colonial world view of those who insist they are not racists, but, well, “things are not what they used to be”.

However, cadre deployment cannot be exempted from culpability. The more substantive problem with the cadre deployment argument is its overemphasis on individuals and the argument, so favoured by the National Treasury and its supporting chorus in the financial media, that our policies are fine – it’s the implementation.

But what if policies have played a central role in ruining the capacity of the state? This certainly applies to the self-imposed, swingeing austerity that has gutted our public sector.

Enter right: the new public management (NPM) approach. In the mid1990s, it was touted in South Africa, particularly by foreign consultants, as the new gold standard for public service reform. It gained greater practical application in the 1980s in Anglophone welfare societies that had associated public administration challenges with an excessively bloated welfare bureaucracy. The NPM paradigm, borrowing extensively from managerial practice in the private corporate world, portrayed its approach, by contrast, as “lean and nimble”, providing “value for money”.

The problem – real or otherwise – for which the model was initially advanced did not remotely apply to the early-1990s South African reality. By the end of apartheid, what remained of a narrow whites-only welfare bureaucracy in an authoritarian and increasingly militarised central state had been considerably corrupted by shadowy intelligence and sanctions-busting networks.

The NPM paradigm privileges a generic financial managerial function that has tended to marginalise the diverse professional skills required in the public service.

While given divisional autonomy as “accounting officers”, managers are controlled from the centre through “output deliverables” and a whole accounting thicket of acronyms – KPIS (key performance indicators), APPS (annual performance plans), and the like. Performance is incentivised financially (“pay for performance”), displacing more relevant public interest criteria like professional peer group reputation, or public respect.

Management control exercised through divisional output targets might work in a private corporation with so many items rolled off the production line, or so many sales achieved. In the public service, departmental output targets are liable to distort its complexity, particularly when addressing key social priorities such as health, education or community safety that require interdepartmental, often all-of-government and active community engagement.

Much public-sector work also requires professional discretion and adaptability. Schoolteachers, healthcare workers and police officers should have the professional training and capacity to respond appropriately to the situation that presents itself.

The most damaging of all the NPM’S interrelated private sector importations into the public sector is its recasting of citizens as clients, tendentiously transforming public service to a marketplace transaction in which citizens become atomised purchasers.

In the private sector, in liberal theory at least, individual consumers supposedly have a “voice” through choices, providing market signals with the purchase of a particular brand, article or service in preference to another.

But most public services are not, and should not be, for-profit brands competing for market share. For most South Africans, when it comes to health care or community safety or education, there is no “market choice”, no option of going to the private health-care market with a medical aid, or purchasing private security, or paying for private schooling.

A model of public service that seeks to emulate the “efficiencies” of the private sector will result in poor redistributive outcomes and the deepening of inequality.

With NPM managers focused on performance-based contracts rather than transparent engagement with society, the critical role of participatory democracy gets eroded, and the necessity of popular developmental activism is seen as an irritant at best.

Have we learnt anything from more than two decades of failed public administration reform? We might not have. The erosion of state capacity during the Zuma-gupta years is now being actively used to argue for the intensification of corporate managerialism. In a cruel twist, an underlying cause of state incapacitation is once more promoted as a solution.