The notion of a nation-state has over the last decade undergone a process of rigorous review to an extent that society has now become complacent to discuss it as a base concept for political engagement and discourse. The preoccupation with the growing hegemony of dominant economies and established ‘nation-states’ as epicentres of the globalisation process is one in a myriad of reasons why ‘the nation-state’ discourse is fast disappearing in our understanding of public administration.
The entrenched globalisation discourse is fast creating conceptual co-ordinates within which scholars argue the position of their thoughts, and in most cases within a sub-context of detaching with their indigenousness at the altar of wanting to intellectually leapfrog themselves to some ‘first world’ paradigms. Consequently we find a growth in ideological bankruptcy and a corresponding indebtedness to the dominating discourse, irrespective of its geographical and/or ‘political ideological origins’.
In his seminal work on the hermeneutics of African Philosophy, Serequeberhan warns of a failure by ‘Third World’ scholars to “realise that a theory always carries, sustains, valorises, and constantly resuscitates within itself the traces of the originative historic ground out of which it was initially theorised”. It is clear from the foregoing that any ideological frame of reference which we adopt as scholars, particularly African, “will automatically and of necessity privilege its own originative historical ground as metaphysically paradigmic for human existence in all of its derivative applications”.
The need for us to repudiate through scholarship the ground upon which we understand ourselves as a society, nation and a self-standing and self determined member of the global community is, and incidentally so, established by the very ideological dominance. The Amie Cesaire caution that “ I have never thought for a moment that our emancipation could come from the right-that is impossible....our liberation placed us on the left, but we ....refused to see the African question as simply a social and economic question”.
It will not be unfair therefore for a right thinking South African public administration scholar and practitioner to ontologically have presupposed our 1994 democratic breakthrough as the “opening site within which the historical place, the there in which, out of which and for which public administration occurs”. This therefore dictates to this thinking generation a call to establish a scholarship legacy that establishes an African paradigm of public administration; and not because it is intellectually necessary but for the sake of the African publics.
This summons for public administration scholars to appear before and intellectual cleansing court of public and intellectual opinion is not only an attempt to decolonise the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline public administration but an effort at creating self-differentiated scholarship, reflective mediacy and a detachment from colonial roots. This is notwithstanding the reality of post-colonial subjects being “perpetual consumers of colonial master ideologies disguised as modernity and/or best practice”.
The antipodes of globalisation and nation-state selfishness have created the extremes of nationalist reawakening and internationalist obligation notwithstanding their complementary nature. It is in the understanding of the state of a nation state that discourses on its publics and therefore public administration can be analysed. It is in this discourse that liberation of the mindset can emerge.
“Discourse, because of its lack of alliance to a clear political agenda, offers a way of thinking about hegemony- the people’s compliance in their own oppression- without assuming that individuals are necessarily passive victims of systems of thought ”. It is in and through discourse that nations shape their ideological parameters. Since the ideology of a society displays itself in political theory, social theory and moral theory the nation-state as a custodian of the state apparatus becomes critical.
A nation-state is loosely defined as a state, or country, that has defined borders and territory. In the nation-state, generally, everyone would agree to speak the same language, probably practice the same or similar types of religion, and share a set of cultural, “national,” values. In this context it is possible to have nation states without nations as it is equally possible to have ‘nations’ without a nation state. The common practice is to have nation-states that are established on the basis of agreed arrangements.
The context within which nation-states are established is in most instances based on the integrative intent that seeks to introduce a certain order which unites the actions of society towards specific and definite goals. The movement of people towards such goals is dependent on organised obligations that are stressed through permissible ranges of conduct thereby evolving instruments whereby the nation-state seeks to obtain conformity to such a range; these are made explicit in a statutory way.
In order for us to have a better grasp of the state of the nation-state, we should impose an analysis prism through which such analyses will be made. For purposes of this paper the nation state will be analysed in terms of the state, the nation and the emerging crisis.
THE STATE
A state is a structure that has the legal right to make rules that are binding over a given population within a given territory and thus has geographical and political characteristics (Lawson 1997:35). A state will always have some form of sovereignty. In this context a state is explained as a political entity with a territory and people as citizens and has a government authorized to make laws for the territory and possesses formal independence and/or sovereignty from the authority of any other nation.
Like any enterprise the State exists on behalf of it stakeholders and in this case the citizens. In order to harness the obligation of its stakeholders and stake owners an enterprise needs capital to sustain itself. At the apex of a democratic state is the maintenance of its voting capital as a base insurance for continued stability and existence. The character and behaviour of voting capital is instructed by the state’s capacity to regulate man’s inherent difference in intelligence, skill and market value (expressed in class terms).
The South African voting capital has in the past fifteen years been analysed from the prism of how it behaves towards the ruling African National Congress; the emerging nexus of political life and analysis in South Africa. The numerical strength in voter terms and the accompanying socio-political moral high ground emanating from post 1994 political arrangements of the ANC makes it an inevitable subject of interrogation in any political laboratory. As a consequence the ANC becomes the keynote of future political diversity and discourse in the South African scheme of things.
Given this circumstance, the differential character of the ruling party and its inherent political profile is instructional to the very conception of government in the South African state. Factually the ANC has won the past three elections first on the basis of historical and Apartheid repudiating reasons; second on the strength of its promise for a better life and increased transformation of the Apartheid state; and thirdly on the basis of focusing on implementation and delivering on the five priorities known to have induced regime change irrespective of that regime’s socio-political history and favour.
In both instances the ANC mustered a two thirds majority, including the Zuma loss of the Western Cape. The Parliamentary majority of the ANC has over the past two Parliaments created a condition where the machinery of party political contest found resonance within the ruling party; whence the Polokwane outcome with Mangaung in the horizon. The multi-ideological nature of the ANC, its ‘people Parliament’ character crafted from the leadership role it assumed in the struggle for a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, created as a keynote for the ANC’s continued existence a condition of diversity in social and opinion terms.
The race for political power created within the South African voting capital the new inequality of access to political power; this inequality has created a contestation for dominance amongst peers and past comrades. If we accept that ‘government is an arena of politics, the prize of politics, and, historically speaking the residue of past politics’ , it follows then that ‘any group which is not itself the government may feel that it is suffering some inferiority, and may be induced to challenge an existing regime’ . In these conditions the political centre holds in so far as the political elite can define and pronounce.
South Africa’s voting capital is in a state of ideological flux. This is evidenced in the growing reliance on the ideological commitment to the past. In an open society that South Africa has become it will be difficult for an ideology neutral political centre to justify itself before a bar of reason and conscience, except to take refuge in the hypocrisy of historical convenience. The transformation instrument cannot be sharpened further than the growing need for feedback on what policies of the recent past are yielding for the impatient marginalised sections of the community.
Like most states that have gone through the trajectories of anti-colonial struggle, post liberation euphoria and the need to ‘consolidate democratic gains’ South Africa has created two extremes of class contestation that need some form of mediation beyond mere sloganeering and power centralisation. The observed contest for the open ideological space within the ANC creates a form of discontent in its voting capital thus eroding the requisite investor confidence from amongst its potential and historically detached new vote investors; commonly referred to as the youth.
The condition of most post liberation democracies being stuck at the stage of cocoon with the political centre being more important that the people creates centre disintegrations that manifest themselves as ‘bitter in-party battles’, ‘outright absence of party eldership induced by unmanaged succession planning’, and ‘insatiable demand for power’ by an impatient youth corps that is disruptive of established generational handover practices characteristic of matured political systems. The impact of these on the ascendant political profile of the country is unparalleled.
This changing political profile of the ruling ANC requires of scholars a deliberate act of creating knowledge that keeps creates a semblance of managed political growth.
The next critical form of capital for the State is government; described as the authoritative expression of the state in terms of its formal functions of law-making (legislative), execution and implementation of laws (executive) as well as the interpretation and application of such laws (judiciary). Governing capital entails the totality of networks that can be harnessed to provide a centrally coordinated leadership by political office bearers and a supportive bureaucracy.
We should accept that government has over the last fifteen years spent time on matters that are related to policy formulation and brought into the public service new people who had the experience of bringing in new thinking thus creating an ‘ideas public service’ leadership corps. The challenge still remains that of creating a capacity to implement these grandiose policies. The result of this state of affairs is that government gets into a condition of being governmentally empty and yet service present through contested practices such as outright privatisation and outsourcing. Hence this government continues to deliver despite its implementation capacity challenges.
Public Administration speaking, South Africa is reported to have more than 1m public servants, and 2% of these are senior managers, 50% of whom are “labelled” as “lower skilled”, 40% “semi skilled” and 8% “highly skilled”. This means that of the 1m public servants, about 990 000 are either lower skilled or semi-skilled. Assuming that it is true that at any given point there is a 25-35% vacancy rate in the public service excluding local government, the state of the nation-state requires attention in terms of resourcing and accelerate developmental interventions.
The state of local government report indicates a chronic vacancy rates in what is referred to as the critical posts of finance, infrastructure and town secretary positions. The skills demography of local government is reflective of the national condition with a particular focus on the town and city engineer positions. The non-functionality of most sewer purification plants and storm water drainage systems is indicative of the state of the nation state as far as public service and administration skills are concerned.
THE NATION OR HUMAN CAPITAL
A nation consists of humans that make up the human capital of a state. It is one of the pillar capitals to sustain a democracy. Human capital development outside the dynamics of its mortality rate remains one of the key risks of state formation investment decisions. The notion of human capital formation is part of the broader health of a democracy thus impacting on how the political value system and guidelines emanating from the body politic are transmitted to subsequent generations.
The state of our human capital as it pertains to public administration is directly impacted by a number of variables that are in themselves moving targets as a results of the nature of the host organisms; human beings. Prominent of the variables is the HIV and AIDS pandemic, and the human development interventions.
Unless otherwise redefined there is a subtle and yet catastrophic destruction of society as a result of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. The 2009 estimates of HIV and AIDS infection rate are recorded to have been about 5.4 million in a population size, and that is officially, of 40 million as at the last census. These figures are compounded by the 1500 new infections a day. The funeral industry reports 1000 deaths per day. If the 2006 statement by the South African Medical Research council which suggested that “the high rates of AIDS mortality would persist in South Africa for at least a decade" is factually continuous we are in a serious conundrum.
To illustrate the unfolding human capital catastrophe facing us, let us further ponder on the following numbers- the 1990 life expectancy rate was 62 years, in 2005 it went down to 49 for women and 47 for men, and it is expected that the next figure will be around 37 years. The implications of this catastrophe is that we are continuously becoming a young nation that will have challenges of institutional memory retention in areas of governance, family values transmission as well as continuity of the national vision as set by leaders.
The emerging population profile indicates therefore that our productive segment of the population is fast becoming extinct; a condition that potentially explains the absorption capacity of South Africa’s economy for foreign nationals that themselves are from worse conditions of population profiles. The threat of sustaining human capital is now encroaching into areas of socio-political impatience as manifest in the growing absence of an elder voice in our communities.
Emerging evidence on politically unstable societies points to the age profile of the politically dominant; the voting age profile within most political formations of South Africa is on a confirmation trend for this assertion. The change fertility rate of youthful populations is also responsible for most revolutions and rebellions known to mankind. The risks of an unbalanced population age profile impacts on matters such as the family as a basic unit of society formation. Reports of child headed families and their impact on the capacity of South Africa learners to compete with their counterparts in the world remains a disturbing feature of the nation-state.
If the government report on the state of the public service on the available skills base is exact, and that is superimposed on the mortality and life expectancy figures as well as the HIV infection rate it follows therefore that the public service and by extension human development efforts in public administration cannot be expunged from the human capital destruction crisis. The humanitarian crisis that faces us has not only affected the supply side of the public service and administration, but is also constraining the developmentalist path we seek to follow.
The cognitive requirements of a developmental state will therefore put an additional strain on the meagre human resources remaining in the current personnel corps in the public service. The lag in technology innovation and the reluctance to embrace non-human delivery systems for the public service is a further hindrance in the process of releasing the few, in terms of skill’ public servants available to the country. Whilst inward migration provides a temporary relief to this challenge, the demand and supply dynamics of the private sector creates a circumstance of perpetual job hopping by the available few thus leaving little to no opportunity for sustained managerial follow-through in the public service.
The foundational logic of public administration practice is in this instance disturbed by the fluidity of the human capital development and retention dynamics of the South African nation-state. The distinguishable activities constituting public administration require skills in the areas of policy making, organising, financing, staffing, work procedures, and control; in order to make the administration of the state possible. The mediatory role of public policy as a key aspect of nation-state management is also compromised by the human capital creation instabilities emanating from the inherent challenges of the schooling, training and development environment.
The competitive advantage of South Africa has over the past three decades been premised on its research and development prowess, albeit racially skewed in per capita output terms. This advantage has over the ‘privatisation, agentisation and outsourcing era’ been declining as a result of a reduced patriotic research ethos that informed isolated Apartheid South Africa. The improving research and development spend as a percentage of GDP that has moved from 0.69% in 1998 to 1% in 2008 is still behind the growing average of 2.3% of South Africa’s trading partners. The net effect of this spending is 1.9 researchers per employee which is amongst the lowest in the world.
The impact of spend on research is observed in the public administration and management field through the stop-start policy making processes that are consultant driven. The ‘go’, ‘on your marks’, and ‘ready’ approach that informed most of our failing policies are an indication of an absent centre of research and development. This state of affairs creates space for foreign ideologues to entrench their proffered policy orientation as a template for public discourse. The declining participation of practitioners in national professional associations is a further indication of this dearth of research and development as a necessary precursor to policy.
The dearth of debate and indigenous discourse within the public administration profession is fast diminishing the moral standing of spectator intellectuals. Left unchallenged this can result in some amongst us, as academics, trying to establish an inner intellectual oligarchy that subordinates and/ or even disenfranchises the ordinary practitioner and by extension the citizenry. Our involvement in the science of knowledge generation and packaging is a strength that can easily become a liability if it is not indigenised and stripped of its originative historical grounding.
In real terms this state of affairs impacts on the ability of virtual capital, predominantly refereed by private sector decision making, to decide on South Africa as an investment destination. The unfettered strength of markets to create perceptual distortions about a country is, and unfortunately so, based on the statistics on matters such as human capital, voting capital, governing capital and in-country private capital. The culture-defining force of private capital through mega communication media systems and advertising as well as lifestyle trend setting has demonstrated through the social network media systems that it can define the destiny of a country; the case of Tunisia and Egypt.
The polarisation of the South African virtual capital environment as a result of legitimate transformation imperatives such as Black Economic Empowerment has created a toxic analysis premise within which capital formation is understood. The declared intent of the ANC to construct a procapitalist, interventionist state that is prepared to use its power, influence and divestment of assets to create a black bourgeoisie, expand the black middle class, and to generally produce a seismic transfer of wealth from white to black over a ten to twenty year period is in most instances cited as a reason for such a polarisation.
The entrenched players in the virtual capital environment have over the past decade operated on an understanding that ‘the national political and economic landscape still demonstrates compelling continuities with the old, and the present government remains heavily conditioned by the foundations of the negotiated transition’. The race hegemony creating potential of a black majority government supported by an identity based bourgeoisie generates the threat of a vigorous political and ideological engineering that foregrounds the recent memories about a legitimating philosophical basis for the draconian structures of white power that was group based, historically grounded, and modern. It is in this context that any conceptualisation of the South African nation-state is managed away from any nationalist reawakening lest it redefines indegenuity and by extension legitimacy of access.
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND TAKE HOME MATTERS
Whilst the above may sound like a twentieth century chapter on governance lamentation, the South African nation-state has had noticeable achievements that are manifest in the urban infrastructure outputs of the development trajectory. Rural development initiatives that are propelled by the continued electrification process continue to decorate the country’s report card since the 1994 democratic breakthrough.
The revolution of our scholarship does not require the wisdom of conformity but a new seriousness and dedication towards generating new knowledge out of our normative and norming environment. The essence of our renaissance requires scholars that refuse to drop down to a lower level of mental performance at the altar of political correctness and convenience. If there is any societal consent manufactured outside our purview, it is our responsibility to reverse engineer the output and make it a national utility.
Unless we change our socialisation to accept reigning discourse without some form of censure on the parameters set by dominant mega communication mediums such as newspapers and television; our society is doomed to have its universities converted to intellectual concentration camps. The decolonisation agenda should be high on our agenda in terms of defining a new paradigm of public administration. If we don’t define ourselves we will surely be defined, and it is difficult to remove a label especially if it is branded. In this interrogation we should be guided by a quest to be ideologically free whilst crafting and indigenous intellectual lamp post for foreign vessels not to crash again but be directed to defined ports and harbours of entry into on our intellectual shores.
It is in the management and control of knowledge creation instruments such as JOPA that we will be better positioned to both initiate and shape a new discourse in the field of public administration. The intellectual boom that allowed the neoliberal agenda to define our public administration should be the last mistake we made as African scholars. The moral high ground that came with the post 1994 euphoria and the Nelson Mandela factor has returned in the form of the crisis of neo-liberalism with the collapse of financial markets as glaring statues of its repudiation. The manner in which economies resurface is both a policy and public administration matter.
As disciples of Nelson Mandela, we agree with him that ours is a long walk and anyone that thinks the walk has ended must do a serious rethink; as for those that are still marching our intellectual contribution will indicate that. Lets us create a monument in the minds of those that follow us by refusing to be taken for granted. May God bless you as you take this great leap, If anyone thought this time would not arrive there are greater moments that they must now start to plan for.
The entrenched globalisation discourse is fast creating conceptual co-ordinates within which scholars argue the position of their thoughts, and in most cases within a sub-context of detaching with their indigenousness at the altar of wanting to intellectually leapfrog themselves to some ‘first world’ paradigms. Consequently we find a growth in ideological bankruptcy and a corresponding indebtedness to the dominating discourse, irrespective of its geographical and/or ‘political ideological origins’.
In his seminal work on the hermeneutics of African Philosophy, Serequeberhan warns of a failure by ‘Third World’ scholars to “realise that a theory always carries, sustains, valorises, and constantly resuscitates within itself the traces of the originative historic ground out of which it was initially theorised”. It is clear from the foregoing that any ideological frame of reference which we adopt as scholars, particularly African, “will automatically and of necessity privilege its own originative historical ground as metaphysically paradigmic for human existence in all of its derivative applications”.
The need for us to repudiate through scholarship the ground upon which we understand ourselves as a society, nation and a self-standing and self determined member of the global community is, and incidentally so, established by the very ideological dominance. The Amie Cesaire caution that “ I have never thought for a moment that our emancipation could come from the right-that is impossible....our liberation placed us on the left, but we ....refused to see the African question as simply a social and economic question”.
It will not be unfair therefore for a right thinking South African public administration scholar and practitioner to ontologically have presupposed our 1994 democratic breakthrough as the “opening site within which the historical place, the there in which, out of which and for which public administration occurs”. This therefore dictates to this thinking generation a call to establish a scholarship legacy that establishes an African paradigm of public administration; and not because it is intellectually necessary but for the sake of the African publics.
This summons for public administration scholars to appear before and intellectual cleansing court of public and intellectual opinion is not only an attempt to decolonise the theoretical underpinnings of the discipline public administration but an effort at creating self-differentiated scholarship, reflective mediacy and a detachment from colonial roots. This is notwithstanding the reality of post-colonial subjects being “perpetual consumers of colonial master ideologies disguised as modernity and/or best practice”.
The antipodes of globalisation and nation-state selfishness have created the extremes of nationalist reawakening and internationalist obligation notwithstanding their complementary nature. It is in the understanding of the state of a nation state that discourses on its publics and therefore public administration can be analysed. It is in this discourse that liberation of the mindset can emerge.
“Discourse, because of its lack of alliance to a clear political agenda, offers a way of thinking about hegemony- the people’s compliance in their own oppression- without assuming that individuals are necessarily passive victims of systems of thought ”. It is in and through discourse that nations shape their ideological parameters. Since the ideology of a society displays itself in political theory, social theory and moral theory the nation-state as a custodian of the state apparatus becomes critical.
A nation-state is loosely defined as a state, or country, that has defined borders and territory. In the nation-state, generally, everyone would agree to speak the same language, probably practice the same or similar types of religion, and share a set of cultural, “national,” values. In this context it is possible to have nation states without nations as it is equally possible to have ‘nations’ without a nation state. The common practice is to have nation-states that are established on the basis of agreed arrangements.
The context within which nation-states are established is in most instances based on the integrative intent that seeks to introduce a certain order which unites the actions of society towards specific and definite goals. The movement of people towards such goals is dependent on organised obligations that are stressed through permissible ranges of conduct thereby evolving instruments whereby the nation-state seeks to obtain conformity to such a range; these are made explicit in a statutory way.
In order for us to have a better grasp of the state of the nation-state, we should impose an analysis prism through which such analyses will be made. For purposes of this paper the nation state will be analysed in terms of the state, the nation and the emerging crisis.
THE STATE
A state is a structure that has the legal right to make rules that are binding over a given population within a given territory and thus has geographical and political characteristics (Lawson 1997:35). A state will always have some form of sovereignty. In this context a state is explained as a political entity with a territory and people as citizens and has a government authorized to make laws for the territory and possesses formal independence and/or sovereignty from the authority of any other nation.
Like any enterprise the State exists on behalf of it stakeholders and in this case the citizens. In order to harness the obligation of its stakeholders and stake owners an enterprise needs capital to sustain itself. At the apex of a democratic state is the maintenance of its voting capital as a base insurance for continued stability and existence. The character and behaviour of voting capital is instructed by the state’s capacity to regulate man’s inherent difference in intelligence, skill and market value (expressed in class terms).
The South African voting capital has in the past fifteen years been analysed from the prism of how it behaves towards the ruling African National Congress; the emerging nexus of political life and analysis in South Africa. The numerical strength in voter terms and the accompanying socio-political moral high ground emanating from post 1994 political arrangements of the ANC makes it an inevitable subject of interrogation in any political laboratory. As a consequence the ANC becomes the keynote of future political diversity and discourse in the South African scheme of things.
Given this circumstance, the differential character of the ruling party and its inherent political profile is instructional to the very conception of government in the South African state. Factually the ANC has won the past three elections first on the basis of historical and Apartheid repudiating reasons; second on the strength of its promise for a better life and increased transformation of the Apartheid state; and thirdly on the basis of focusing on implementation and delivering on the five priorities known to have induced regime change irrespective of that regime’s socio-political history and favour.
In both instances the ANC mustered a two thirds majority, including the Zuma loss of the Western Cape. The Parliamentary majority of the ANC has over the past two Parliaments created a condition where the machinery of party political contest found resonance within the ruling party; whence the Polokwane outcome with Mangaung in the horizon. The multi-ideological nature of the ANC, its ‘people Parliament’ character crafted from the leadership role it assumed in the struggle for a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, created as a keynote for the ANC’s continued existence a condition of diversity in social and opinion terms.
The race for political power created within the South African voting capital the new inequality of access to political power; this inequality has created a contestation for dominance amongst peers and past comrades. If we accept that ‘government is an arena of politics, the prize of politics, and, historically speaking the residue of past politics’ , it follows then that ‘any group which is not itself the government may feel that it is suffering some inferiority, and may be induced to challenge an existing regime’ . In these conditions the political centre holds in so far as the political elite can define and pronounce.
South Africa’s voting capital is in a state of ideological flux. This is evidenced in the growing reliance on the ideological commitment to the past. In an open society that South Africa has become it will be difficult for an ideology neutral political centre to justify itself before a bar of reason and conscience, except to take refuge in the hypocrisy of historical convenience. The transformation instrument cannot be sharpened further than the growing need for feedback on what policies of the recent past are yielding for the impatient marginalised sections of the community.
Like most states that have gone through the trajectories of anti-colonial struggle, post liberation euphoria and the need to ‘consolidate democratic gains’ South Africa has created two extremes of class contestation that need some form of mediation beyond mere sloganeering and power centralisation. The observed contest for the open ideological space within the ANC creates a form of discontent in its voting capital thus eroding the requisite investor confidence from amongst its potential and historically detached new vote investors; commonly referred to as the youth.
The condition of most post liberation democracies being stuck at the stage of cocoon with the political centre being more important that the people creates centre disintegrations that manifest themselves as ‘bitter in-party battles’, ‘outright absence of party eldership induced by unmanaged succession planning’, and ‘insatiable demand for power’ by an impatient youth corps that is disruptive of established generational handover practices characteristic of matured political systems. The impact of these on the ascendant political profile of the country is unparalleled.
This changing political profile of the ruling ANC requires of scholars a deliberate act of creating knowledge that keeps creates a semblance of managed political growth.
The next critical form of capital for the State is government; described as the authoritative expression of the state in terms of its formal functions of law-making (legislative), execution and implementation of laws (executive) as well as the interpretation and application of such laws (judiciary). Governing capital entails the totality of networks that can be harnessed to provide a centrally coordinated leadership by political office bearers and a supportive bureaucracy.
We should accept that government has over the last fifteen years spent time on matters that are related to policy formulation and brought into the public service new people who had the experience of bringing in new thinking thus creating an ‘ideas public service’ leadership corps. The challenge still remains that of creating a capacity to implement these grandiose policies. The result of this state of affairs is that government gets into a condition of being governmentally empty and yet service present through contested practices such as outright privatisation and outsourcing. Hence this government continues to deliver despite its implementation capacity challenges.
Public Administration speaking, South Africa is reported to have more than 1m public servants, and 2% of these are senior managers, 50% of whom are “labelled” as “lower skilled”, 40% “semi skilled” and 8% “highly skilled”. This means that of the 1m public servants, about 990 000 are either lower skilled or semi-skilled. Assuming that it is true that at any given point there is a 25-35% vacancy rate in the public service excluding local government, the state of the nation-state requires attention in terms of resourcing and accelerate developmental interventions.
The state of local government report indicates a chronic vacancy rates in what is referred to as the critical posts of finance, infrastructure and town secretary positions. The skills demography of local government is reflective of the national condition with a particular focus on the town and city engineer positions. The non-functionality of most sewer purification plants and storm water drainage systems is indicative of the state of the nation state as far as public service and administration skills are concerned.
THE NATION OR HUMAN CAPITAL
A nation consists of humans that make up the human capital of a state. It is one of the pillar capitals to sustain a democracy. Human capital development outside the dynamics of its mortality rate remains one of the key risks of state formation investment decisions. The notion of human capital formation is part of the broader health of a democracy thus impacting on how the political value system and guidelines emanating from the body politic are transmitted to subsequent generations.
The state of our human capital as it pertains to public administration is directly impacted by a number of variables that are in themselves moving targets as a results of the nature of the host organisms; human beings. Prominent of the variables is the HIV and AIDS pandemic, and the human development interventions.
Unless otherwise redefined there is a subtle and yet catastrophic destruction of society as a result of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. The 2009 estimates of HIV and AIDS infection rate are recorded to have been about 5.4 million in a population size, and that is officially, of 40 million as at the last census. These figures are compounded by the 1500 new infections a day. The funeral industry reports 1000 deaths per day. If the 2006 statement by the South African Medical Research council which suggested that “the high rates of AIDS mortality would persist in South Africa for at least a decade" is factually continuous we are in a serious conundrum.
To illustrate the unfolding human capital catastrophe facing us, let us further ponder on the following numbers- the 1990 life expectancy rate was 62 years, in 2005 it went down to 49 for women and 47 for men, and it is expected that the next figure will be around 37 years. The implications of this catastrophe is that we are continuously becoming a young nation that will have challenges of institutional memory retention in areas of governance, family values transmission as well as continuity of the national vision as set by leaders.
The emerging population profile indicates therefore that our productive segment of the population is fast becoming extinct; a condition that potentially explains the absorption capacity of South Africa’s economy for foreign nationals that themselves are from worse conditions of population profiles. The threat of sustaining human capital is now encroaching into areas of socio-political impatience as manifest in the growing absence of an elder voice in our communities.
Emerging evidence on politically unstable societies points to the age profile of the politically dominant; the voting age profile within most political formations of South Africa is on a confirmation trend for this assertion. The change fertility rate of youthful populations is also responsible for most revolutions and rebellions known to mankind. The risks of an unbalanced population age profile impacts on matters such as the family as a basic unit of society formation. Reports of child headed families and their impact on the capacity of South Africa learners to compete with their counterparts in the world remains a disturbing feature of the nation-state.
If the government report on the state of the public service on the available skills base is exact, and that is superimposed on the mortality and life expectancy figures as well as the HIV infection rate it follows therefore that the public service and by extension human development efforts in public administration cannot be expunged from the human capital destruction crisis. The humanitarian crisis that faces us has not only affected the supply side of the public service and administration, but is also constraining the developmentalist path we seek to follow.
The cognitive requirements of a developmental state will therefore put an additional strain on the meagre human resources remaining in the current personnel corps in the public service. The lag in technology innovation and the reluctance to embrace non-human delivery systems for the public service is a further hindrance in the process of releasing the few, in terms of skill’ public servants available to the country. Whilst inward migration provides a temporary relief to this challenge, the demand and supply dynamics of the private sector creates a circumstance of perpetual job hopping by the available few thus leaving little to no opportunity for sustained managerial follow-through in the public service.
The foundational logic of public administration practice is in this instance disturbed by the fluidity of the human capital development and retention dynamics of the South African nation-state. The distinguishable activities constituting public administration require skills in the areas of policy making, organising, financing, staffing, work procedures, and control; in order to make the administration of the state possible. The mediatory role of public policy as a key aspect of nation-state management is also compromised by the human capital creation instabilities emanating from the inherent challenges of the schooling, training and development environment.
The competitive advantage of South Africa has over the past three decades been premised on its research and development prowess, albeit racially skewed in per capita output terms. This advantage has over the ‘privatisation, agentisation and outsourcing era’ been declining as a result of a reduced patriotic research ethos that informed isolated Apartheid South Africa. The improving research and development spend as a percentage of GDP that has moved from 0.69% in 1998 to 1% in 2008 is still behind the growing average of 2.3% of South Africa’s trading partners. The net effect of this spending is 1.9 researchers per employee which is amongst the lowest in the world.
The impact of spend on research is observed in the public administration and management field through the stop-start policy making processes that are consultant driven. The ‘go’, ‘on your marks’, and ‘ready’ approach that informed most of our failing policies are an indication of an absent centre of research and development. This state of affairs creates space for foreign ideologues to entrench their proffered policy orientation as a template for public discourse. The declining participation of practitioners in national professional associations is a further indication of this dearth of research and development as a necessary precursor to policy.
The dearth of debate and indigenous discourse within the public administration profession is fast diminishing the moral standing of spectator intellectuals. Left unchallenged this can result in some amongst us, as academics, trying to establish an inner intellectual oligarchy that subordinates and/ or even disenfranchises the ordinary practitioner and by extension the citizenry. Our involvement in the science of knowledge generation and packaging is a strength that can easily become a liability if it is not indigenised and stripped of its originative historical grounding.
In real terms this state of affairs impacts on the ability of virtual capital, predominantly refereed by private sector decision making, to decide on South Africa as an investment destination. The unfettered strength of markets to create perceptual distortions about a country is, and unfortunately so, based on the statistics on matters such as human capital, voting capital, governing capital and in-country private capital. The culture-defining force of private capital through mega communication media systems and advertising as well as lifestyle trend setting has demonstrated through the social network media systems that it can define the destiny of a country; the case of Tunisia and Egypt.
The polarisation of the South African virtual capital environment as a result of legitimate transformation imperatives such as Black Economic Empowerment has created a toxic analysis premise within which capital formation is understood. The declared intent of the ANC to construct a procapitalist, interventionist state that is prepared to use its power, influence and divestment of assets to create a black bourgeoisie, expand the black middle class, and to generally produce a seismic transfer of wealth from white to black over a ten to twenty year period is in most instances cited as a reason for such a polarisation.
The entrenched players in the virtual capital environment have over the past decade operated on an understanding that ‘the national political and economic landscape still demonstrates compelling continuities with the old, and the present government remains heavily conditioned by the foundations of the negotiated transition’. The race hegemony creating potential of a black majority government supported by an identity based bourgeoisie generates the threat of a vigorous political and ideological engineering that foregrounds the recent memories about a legitimating philosophical basis for the draconian structures of white power that was group based, historically grounded, and modern. It is in this context that any conceptualisation of the South African nation-state is managed away from any nationalist reawakening lest it redefines indegenuity and by extension legitimacy of access.
CONCLUDING REMARKS AND TAKE HOME MATTERS
Whilst the above may sound like a twentieth century chapter on governance lamentation, the South African nation-state has had noticeable achievements that are manifest in the urban infrastructure outputs of the development trajectory. Rural development initiatives that are propelled by the continued electrification process continue to decorate the country’s report card since the 1994 democratic breakthrough.
The revolution of our scholarship does not require the wisdom of conformity but a new seriousness and dedication towards generating new knowledge out of our normative and norming environment. The essence of our renaissance requires scholars that refuse to drop down to a lower level of mental performance at the altar of political correctness and convenience. If there is any societal consent manufactured outside our purview, it is our responsibility to reverse engineer the output and make it a national utility.
Unless we change our socialisation to accept reigning discourse without some form of censure on the parameters set by dominant mega communication mediums such as newspapers and television; our society is doomed to have its universities converted to intellectual concentration camps. The decolonisation agenda should be high on our agenda in terms of defining a new paradigm of public administration. If we don’t define ourselves we will surely be defined, and it is difficult to remove a label especially if it is branded. In this interrogation we should be guided by a quest to be ideologically free whilst crafting and indigenous intellectual lamp post for foreign vessels not to crash again but be directed to defined ports and harbours of entry into on our intellectual shores.
It is in the management and control of knowledge creation instruments such as JOPA that we will be better positioned to both initiate and shape a new discourse in the field of public administration. The intellectual boom that allowed the neoliberal agenda to define our public administration should be the last mistake we made as African scholars. The moral high ground that came with the post 1994 euphoria and the Nelson Mandela factor has returned in the form of the crisis of neo-liberalism with the collapse of financial markets as glaring statues of its repudiation. The manner in which economies resurface is both a policy and public administration matter.
As disciples of Nelson Mandela, we agree with him that ours is a long walk and anyone that thinks the walk has ended must do a serious rethink; as for those that are still marching our intellectual contribution will indicate that. Lets us create a monument in the minds of those that follow us by refusing to be taken for granted. May God bless you as you take this great leap, If anyone thought this time would not arrive there are greater moments that they must now start to plan for.
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