The public service should be free of party-political interests: The cadre deployment debate should be rescued from politics

The edited version was published in the Sunday Times on 03 March 2024 and headlined, "The public service should be free of party-political interests."

The election of President Ramaphosa as the fourteenth President of the ANC and the fifth President of the republic was with a promise of a new dawn. The excitement included the prospect of a technocratic presidency focusing on the nuts and bolts of truncating the slide towards a crisis and potentially a failed state. His safaris in private sector boards were touted as the experience capital South Africa would invest its public power in for five years. The liberation promise in the Constitution was assumed to have been in the custody of the right hands. 

South Africa might have overlooked that all the capital forms Ramaphosa commanded would depend on the executive authority and administrative capability teams he would ultimately surround himself with. Concerning the executive authority team he could put together, the members of parliament his party has deployed would be his gross list from which to select the National Executive. This meant he would be as good as the sum total of the team he selects or is structurally given. The brute truth is that the pulse and cadence of efficiency within the state’s organs would depend on how the executive authority organises the administrative capability of the state. The executive authority of the state is the most active agency of any state. The collective habits of those occupying national executive offices become the values of state administration and, ultimately, the nation. 

The debate on who and how the public sector is resourced should thus be rescued from being a national political issue and wrestled back into its safety zone of state efficiency realm.  Notwithstanding that public service is inherently political, its organisational arrangements can be as normative as those in which the executive authority of state organs vests. As a nation, we should be more worried about who or what quality we have on the shelves when politicians' prerogative and arbitrary decisions start searching for public servants. 

Cadre deployment creates a legitimate criticism that those deployed will be accountable to the party and not the taxpayer, which, in essence, is the one commissioning the public servant. A casual search of what the ANC mean or what is meant by deployment will yield a different context. In its foremost instructive strategy and tactics policy document, the ANC sums up its position on cadre development as,

“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. In this regard, the ANC is responsible for promoting progressive traditions within the intellectual community… .”

 

For a long time, the ANC has operated as the Parliament of the People and thus saw itself as the alternative government for those who were disenfranchised.  Its relationship with state power has always been that of seeing institutions of the state as targets of change and 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 its role as the architect of the Constitution (which now defines the legality of the National Democratic Revolution) it has (arguably) bequeathed to any political party that lays its hands on state power the right to reinterpret the NDR in terms of how to achieve its objective of establishing a NDS. In the process, and it would seem, the ANC did not recalibrate its alternative government claim to meet the demands of the constitutional and democratic order which obtains.

As a result, the transition to a post-apartheid democratic order would not have been allowed to be commandeered by a bureaucracy the ANC, the new governing party, did not trust. Despite the ANC having been part of the multilateral public administration and management transformation discourses, as a government in waiting, which advocated for public service reform programs that derisked the state from the prerogative arbitrariness of politicians, it took the risky decision of making public service and administration to be managed politically through a state department. The South African conditions after 1994 dictated such a transition, and a transitionocracy that set in was left too long to develop a political economy whose liabilities include misreading the true intentions of ‘cadre development’ in its time and space conceptualisation. The entrenchment of a Public Service Commission in the Constitution remains the apex indicator that what we institutionally have can never bring public service stability for as long as its politics are party-political and not institutional. In hush tones, academics and public affairs scholars are ready for a consensus establishing a full-house public service commission accountable to Parliament and the normative force of public service.

The myth that interests-driven politicians can subjugate their prerogative arbitrariness in favor of normativity should be debunked. Politics as a vocation survives on interests to make sense; like water is to fish, so are the interests of politicians to politics. The character of the South African Constitution is, by design, a democracy-reinforcing constraint without which the legal character of the liberation promise in the Constitution will be at risk. This is what has made principle rather than arbitrary law-making to be instructive to how we are governed. To the extent that the freely elected representatives of the people shall govern on their behalf, it will always be beholden to such governance and not be inconsistent with the Constitution as the supreme law. In this circumstance, society’s insurance should be calibrated to make the consequences of public servants acting unlawfully because of political instruction individually consequential. 

We should insist on the minimum qualifications for public service employment as a society. Commensurate with the maturity of politics and the growing regard for people to be qualified, even as politicians, we should spend time developing standards for public service commissioning. The red, yellow, and blue cards we devise for governance should improve the quality of the public service game, regardless of who the player is. As a minimum to the politics of our democracy, we should demand control of the normative aspects of the public sector resourcing value chain. Equally, we should insist on creating space for those we create to enter the public sector with a commitment to loyally execute the lawful policies of the government of the day. This control can only be guaranteed if the Public Service Commission takes charge of the public service as an enabling institution. 

While race is still the dominant vector of analysis on most criteria to determine the extent of transformation, and will be for extended periods, society should develop dynamic criteria to rescue currently race-disadvantaged competent South Africans to find space in the public service as a vocation. What should be expunged from this criterion over time is loyalty to the political party as criteria. If the argument is that the Constitution represents the victory of the liberation movement, then lawfulness is what our liberation is about to the extent that we are constitutional. Save for correcting apartheid-created demographics, anyone employed by the state will be 'deployed' to good societal use by the Constitution. 

The public service is a critical indicator of how a society treats and respects its citizens. It is through the neglect of the public service by society, and more especially the private sector, whilst it is still strong, that countries end up with a public service operating like an economic gangster. As an astute politician, Ramaphosa, by making corruption and state capture his enemies, knew that nothing rallies the troops like a common enemy. Unfortunately, this was an enemy, and few of his generals agreed it was the true enemy. As matters are, South Africa will have new permutations of power after the 2024 elections, irrespective of one party getting the magic 50% plus to govern. Any triumph will be hollowed out by the exigencies of taking South Africa into a new trajectory of statehood and development. The governing party is procuring “a mandate to be different”, and this might include implementing ‘its nostalgically defended cadre development policy’ according to the original playbook they have written for such a game. One of the critical aspects of the new path will be how the public service is reorganised to have the capabilities the South African economy and developmental needs expect of it. CUT!!!