Undo public service patronage by refusing apartheid in fresh suit.

This was published in the Business Day 26 June 2020

South Africa is entering an intensive phase of coalition government. A lot that should be reset must be foregrounded. Public Service reform must take advantage of this policy boom cycle. Electoral majority governing partyism choked reforms that could have moved the proverbial needle. The GNU statement of intent is evident in the principles that underpin it. One of the thematic areas of focus is a professional, merit-based, non-partisan, developmental public service that puts people first. The historical opposition complex has since 1994 been vocal about cadre deployment as the source of public service and sector dysfunction. 

While there is consensus that 'cadre deployment' was vulnerable to being misconstrued and thus abused, its objectives and variously interpreted iterations in other democracies, such as it being presented as national c-suite management, remains one of the proven strategic interventions a nation can make to be globally competitive. As the GNU deals with 'cadre deployment' abuses of the past, it should not introduce new abuses laced with euphemisms suggesting competence is an exclusive domain of racial groups other than Black-African or continuing to insist that ‘DG’s in departments reporting to a political party must be appointed by that party's panel only; that would be an ecdysis of the apartheid snake.

 

When a GNU partner advocates for the review of contracts of DGs, it invites an analysis of where it has been governing regarding its track record on public service c-suite appointments. In some parts of South Africa, the logic of merit and competence has been drifting away from the obligations of reflecting the true national demographics at best and, at worst, the regional ones. The brute truth is that since its formal establishment in the aftermath of the 1910 Constitution, the RSA public service has never been a neutral institution in shaping our tormented history. It enabled colonialism, apartheid, and the past thirty years' false starts to build the antithesis of apartheid-colonialism. There can be no logic other than seeing everything through the vector of race, which can justify the demand for unregulated commissioning of all South Africans into the public service.

 

As an institution, the public service has been able to execute lawful policies of the government of the day loyally. In its 113 years of formal existence, if the inception date of the Public Service Commission is a departure point, the public service has been institutionalised to favour or prejudice those it employs or commissions because of political party support or support for one cause or the other, including racial profiling of competence. While attempts to insulate the public service from the prerogative and arbitrary whims of executive authorities envisaged in the Constitution, the institutional government mechanisms have not been on the side of professional norms and standards as the final arbiter to constitute a capable state.  

 

What is at issue is the extent to which the executed 'lawful policies' will ensure -human dignity, social justice, non-racialism, non-sexism, and fulfilment of human rights. The legitimacy of the policies, and by extension, those manning the organs of state created to implement them, the public service being dominant, has been the longest societal grievance to date. In the pre-1994 democratic breakthrough era, it was about its colonial apartheid character. In the post-apartheid era, its profoundly Black, and African in particular, character attracted competence and capability as one of the substrate grievances, besides state capture and corruption, which still has not met the projected massification of public servants in orange overalls. 

 

In recent times, however, the dysfunctions in the public service, disintegrating public infrastructure, all-time low morale of public servants, gross interference of political party patronage appointments, and the shifting target of knowing who the public is in RSA -have laid bare just how out of step the public service institutional architecture is with changing realities and development priorities. The urgency of addressing these issues is clear. If the GNU is to have a chance to address public service and challenges effectively and equitably, the governance architecture of the executive authority created three decades ago must be radically reformed. Without vitiating the apparent role of human competence and political interference, the problem is more systemic and institutional. Several priorities to deal with this stand out.

 

First and foremost, the Public Service Commission, a pivotal player in the reform process, should be reinstated with its original authority to commission citizens into the public service. Its composition should be based on stringent professional criteria, eradicating any potential for patronage. In commissioning citizens to the public service, the PSC must be rigorously evaluated on its ability to select individuals from society who can faithfully execute the lawful policies of the government of the day, as mandated by the Constitution.

 

Second, as a Chapter 10 institution, the Public Service Commission must be restored to its position of determining the resourcing of generic human and labour-saving devices. This would mean the country should not have public service and administration under an executive authority. This function should be subjected to a cognitive professional community accounting to Parliament, in which the legislative authority of the Republic vests. The provincialization of the PSC should follow the pattern of Chapter 9 institutions in how they account for and report to provincial legislatures. A mechanism to enrol local government into the firmament of public service commissioning without encroaching on its distinctiveness as a sphere of government should be devised. The professionalisation environment is ready for a PSC-driven public service reform. Public servants must be commissioned, not deployed; they belong not to parties; they are as public as all that is public.

 

Third, public service training and development should be streamlined to ensure that it produces a civil service that can ‘loyally execute the lawful policies of the government of the day’. Training should be about developing skills, knowledge, and attributes to help a country become globally competitive. There should be more focus on ‘how-to-administer’ a state and less on the ‘what-is-issues’ in which South Africa has abundant people who can demonstrate such competence. The National School of Government should be recalibrated into a public service vocational centre to bridge the gap between the overconcentrated theoretical public service and the practical needs of delivering services.

The time for political patronage and party patronage trumping competence has passed. GNU partners should demonstrate their commitment to the arrival of the death of cadre development, including its revised forms, as we saw during the negotiation of Cabinet positions. South Africa has a pool of competent men and women who are members of political parties but are ready to work for any governing party which implements its policies through the machinery of the state in a lawful manner and consistent with the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. We cannot be disappointed again when we have such a dynamic legal framework.