The public service should be free of party-political interests
The election of Cyril Ramaphosa as the 14th president of the ANC and the fifth president of the country came with the promise of a new dawn. At last, the country would have a president who could halt South Africa’s slide towards being a failed state.
But South Africa overlooked the reality that all the power Ramaphosa commanded would depend on the executive authority and administrative capability of teams he would surround himself with. His government would be chosen from his party’s list of MPs. This meant he would be only as good as the team he selected. In turn, the efficiency of the state’s organs would depend on how the executive organised the administrative capability of the state.
Though the public service is inherently political, its organisational arrangements can be as normative as those in which executive authority is vested. As a nation, we should be more worried about who is employed in the public service when politicians arbitrarily decide on public servants.
Cadre deployment creates a legitimate criticism that those deployed will be accountable to the party and not the taxpayer, which is, in essence, the one commissioning the public servant.
However, a cursory investigation of what the ANC means by “deployment” places this issue in a different light.
In its strategy and tactics policy document, the ANC explains its cadre development policy as follows: “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.”
For a long time the ANC operated as a “parliament of the people”, seeing itself as an alternative government for the disenfranchised. Thus it had long seen state institutions as targets of 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 adopting South Africa’s democratic constitution, the ANC did not adjust its alternative government claim to meet the demands of the new legal order.
As a result, when it came to power the ANC did not trust the bureaucracy in place. Despite endorsing public administration and management transformation discourses that advocated for public service reform programmes to reduce the risk of the state being dominated by arbitrary political decisions, it decided to allow the country’s public service and administration to be managed politically through a state department.
Conditions in South Africa after 1994 mandated such a transition, and the “transitionocracy” put in place developed a political economy whose liabilities included misreading the true intentions behind “cadre development”. The Public Service Commission entrenched in the constitution can never bring about public service stability, as it is dominated by party-political considerations.
The myth that interest-driven politicians can subjugate their arbitrariness should be debunked. Politics survives on interests to make sense. The South African constitution is a democracyreinforcing construct without which the promise of liberation will be at risk. The constitution has made principle rather than arbitrary lawmaking the key feature of how we are governed.
There must be minimum qualification requirements for those employed in the public service. Equally, we should insist that those we appoint to the public service are committed to loyally carry out the lawful policies of the government of the day. The Public Service
Commission must be given the powers it needs to execute an oversight function.
While race is still the dominant issue in transformation, and will continue to be for some time, society should develop dynamic criteria to help race-disadvantaged competent South Africans to find jobs in the public service. What should be removed from this criterion over time is loyalty to a political party. If the constitution represents the victory of the liberation movement, then lawfulness is what our liberation is about.
The public service is a critical indicator of how a society treats its citizens. It is through neglect of the public service by society, and more especially the private sector, that countries end up with a public service operating like a criminal. As an astute politician, Ramaphosa has made corruption and state capture the focus of his attention.
South Africa will have new permutations of power after this year’s elections, irrespective of whether any party obtains a clear majority to govern. Any triumph will be hollowed out by the exigencies of placing South Africa on a new developmental trajectory. The governing party’s mandate might be to implement “its nostalgically defended cadre development policy”. One of the critical aspects in the country’s new path will be how the public service is reorganised to be able to develop South Africa’s economy.