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The passing of an era: A tribute to Professor Stan Sangweni


As we reminisce on the Public Service as the index institution of leadership in the development of globally competitive nations, we are saddened to hear of the passing of the founding father of the South African post-apartheid Public Service Commission, Pof Stan Sangweni.

Affectionately called Bra Stan, despite his visible elder looks, and because of the respect he showed for everyone, Professor Sangweni was a scholar, leader, mentor and institution builder to many. I met Prof Sangweni at the South African Foundation for Public Management (SAFPUM), a Public Administration and Management think tank that folded the apartheid era South African Institute of Public Administration (SAIPA), and birthed the South African Association of Public Administration and Management (SAAPAM). He was one of the cognitive cohort of leaders that conceptualised the new post-apartheid Public Service and Administration System entrenched in Chapter 10 of the South African Constitution. In that cohort history records Former Pubic Service Minister Dr Zola Skweyiya, Professor Sibusiso Vil-Nkomo, Dr Yvonne Muthien, Dr Patrick Fitzgerald, Professor Job Mokgoro, Sandile Nogxina, Dr Paseka Ncholo, Squire Mahlangu and several others.


In their contribution to the institutionalisation of a values based Public Service and Administration system, the Professor Sangweni led cognitive cohort entrenched the inter-generational public service principles whose implementation guided the Public Service Act, the repurposing of Public Service Traning and Development, the deracialisation-based transformation of the Public Service, and the uniformisation of Public Service and Administration at all spheres of government. Tasked with the role of building institutions whose functioning would transition the country's Public Administration system from being the a apex template of state sponsored institutional racial segregation to a non-racial and capable Public Service, the Sangweni Cognitive Cohort left frameworks whose legacy is yet to be fully realised. It is the ideational prowess embedded in their construct of a capable state supporting Public  Service that will continue to separate this cognitive cohort of leadership as a cut above the rest, yer to find one it can be second to.


In mourning Professor Sangweni the beginning of a passing generation, we should do so understanding that theirs was to define and conceptualise a new path for a South African Public Service, and this the did with a sufficient measure of distinction. It is the extend to which the inheriting generation of cognitive leaders dislodge from the defining path that has almost become a quicksand, and redirect the country towards an implementation one. The public service principles set out in the Constitution and the subsequent legislations creating a legal framework for their achievement are lying in shelves screaming for implementation attention. These require bureaucrats schooled in a tradition to implement what government has set out as its tasks. A bureaucracy that should craft its space in history beyond the defining roles the Sangweni generation did.


A befitting and practical tribute to Professor Stan Sangweni will not only be the renaming of the National School of Government after him, but also ensuring that the name redefines the school to be a school that focuses on producing "a bureaucracy that can govern more than knowing about government". The Sangweni Government School should have laboratories of government auxiliary functions such as cost benefit analysis, work study, archiving of public records, report writing, policy generating research, evidence based public policy development, accounting studies, and the many other skills required to anchor a public service as features defining its excellence. This, and I submit, will be what was envisaged by The Professor Sangweni cohort led by the humanism that defined a Mandela Presidency.


The ability of the Sangweni generation to have what they did as standing monuments for generations beyond them to benefit, makes them a benchmark of leadership that instructs to all of us the following dictum: when its time to handover please do so. As they ascended podiums that required their institutionness as persons, they brought with them and into government and other podiums themselves in a manner that made us, the served, feel greater than them. 


In the Cornel West parlance ‘Professor had to be the inaugural Public Service Commission Chairperson for African leadership excellence to stand up in the world’. Like many in his age cohort that are passing on, he towered for Africa a new Public Service that entrenched ethics and accountability as its undergirding features. It is what his generation chiselled into definitions of public service that should be credited for the system to reject corruption as a system failure more than a subjective choice by those in charge. 


In a poem recognising this cohort, a South African Poet writes;


Their light is fading.

We chasing their shadows

Into the future their claws are gripping 

Theirs is now of the grave.

Physical graves with numbers. 

Virtual graves we don’t know. 

Graves that are our hearts.

Graves that are or should be our values.

Graves that are libraries and their stories written. 

Graves that are their legacy, upheld or otherwise


Lala ngoxolo, Sango elibanzi

Nina eningaweli ngezibuko

Eniwela ngezimpande zomfula


Dr FM Lucky Mathebula 

The Thinc Foundation 


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