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Decoding Thabo Mbeki at SAAPAM Conference: Public Service is a vocation not a ticket to the trough.

An edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 01 October 2023

South Africa is blessed with a unique context of having its heads of state living long enough to see the good and bad of what they presided upon. At last count, the previous seven Presidents lived long enough with their Cabinet Ministers and senior bureaucrats to experience the fruits or mess of their labour and decisions with us. What they failed to deliver affects rains on all of us in the same way, albeit we experience it differently. 

This is a unique feature we need to use more as a society to draw from a well of experience and truths we foreground when it is no longer there. In his speech to Africa's most organised Association of Public Administration and Management (SAAPAM), President Mbeki, as a keynote speaker, addressed the Public Administration and Management discipline community of practitioners and academics on the issue that the state's failure is their failure. If running a state is a function of public administration and management, failing is a reflection of the systemic challenges in the theory and practice of the discipline. 


President Mbeki made it clear that bureaucrats and scholars in the discipline collude with many of the acts that ultimately run the state down if they do not demonstrate with evidence where such failures come from. It is the textbooks, manuals, and training programs which academic design is shaping the supply side of what ultimately constitutes the mind of the state, public servants. It is equally those that are organs of state in their personal capacity responsible for the depth of decay in the public service. 


When society, and sometimes interestingly including the very public servants, advocates the privatisation of public services because of poor service, humanity is announcing through action a vote of no confidence in those in the public service. Unless it is for a profit motive, the success of the private sector where the state fails indicates the failure of the public service at its work. To believe and then actively design to prove through public policy that what you are employed to do can be done better by others is a sign of maturity to self-reflect and an abdication of accountability. 


The SAAPAM Conference has, in response to the Mbeki Challenge, resolved to perfect how it holds its members professionally accountable to the better or worse of the public sector. 

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