We know the South African state is broken, but how do we fix it — particularly if the political will to do so is weak, at best?
Drag them, kicking and screaming, to reform, says Public Service Commission (PSC) chair Prof Somadoda Fikeni.
Fikeni spoke to the FM after President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the PSC Act into law two weeks ago — a shot in the arm for the independence and mandate of the commission. Along with the Public Service Amendment Act and the Public Administration Management Amendment Act, it is one of three pieces of legislation signed into law between April and September dealing directly with statecraft and aimed at professionalising the public service, extricating it from the grip of party barons and politicians.
Political will is a critical component of public administration reform. This was made clear by Fikeni in his testimony at the Madlanga commission two weeks ago, where he described state inefficiency as intentional, designed to enrich the politically connected.
“We will have to drag them kicking and screaming. That’s why the exposition at the Madlanga commission was meant to say to the public and everyone that what we have observed is a systemic, deliberate undermining of institutions. It’s not an accident,” Fikeni says.
“It’s not some poor performance thing. It’s a deliberate criminalisation of institutions. Once we all understand that and the public has that consciousness, then the whole conversation will change.”
Another piece of legislation signed into law in April, the Public Service Amendment Act, is seen as crucial. Its aim is to professionalise the public service, shifting crucial human resource powers such as hiring, disciplinary processes and firing out of the hands of politicians (ministers and MECs) to departmental administrative heads such as directors-general or department heads.
It delineates political and administrative roles more clearly and bans senior administrators from holding office in political parties. Among its more controversial provisions is a more powerful oversight role for the director-general in the presidency — now billed to oversee the entire public administration, giving extra muscle to the already powerful presidency.
Another act to professionalise the public service, the Public Administration Management Amendment Act, bans public servants from doing business with the state.
Fikeni firmly believes the state can be reformed, and quickly. He refers to the South African Revenue Service (Sars) by way of example.
Sars was gutted by Tom Moyane, former commissioner and ally to former president Jacob Zuma, leading to an undercollection in taxes of almost R100bn while he was in office between 2014 and 2018. Yet the institution was rebuilt by his successor, Edward Kieswetter, in just two years.
“Sars took literally 2½ years and look where they are now,” Fikeni says. “Things are automated. They can process some of your claims in just 48 hours. Imagine going to a police station and your record suddenly shows up and even if investigators want to look for it, they do not have to fumble all over the place.”
Of course, Sars isn’t a simple example. The tax agency was built for efficiency from the get-go, was modernised under former commissioner Pravin Gordhan in the 2000s, and had an ingrained institutional culture of a “higher purpose”.
It was the solid foundation which allowed for a quick turnaround. The rest of the state does not have the same advantages.
Failure by design
Fikeni and other researchers in the public service space all suggest that the current malaise is by design — our statecraft was designed to fail by the constitution, the very document that was meant to create a public service to cater for all.
Speaking at the New South Institute (NSI) Statecraft 2026 conference at the Gordon Institute of Business Science last week, NSI director Ivor Chipkin traced how the early drafters of the constitution had a different vision of public administration to the one which appeared in the final constitution of 1996.
He describes how an independent PSC all but disappeared from the final constitution after its earlier iterations envisioned a more independent, professional public service, bolstered by strong PSC oversight. (The act signed two weeks ago by Ramaphosa hands independence to the PSC after a 19-year battle.)
“First, the PSC is [in the final constitution] stripped of any executive authority. It has no jurisdiction over appointments, promotions or conditions of service. Second, it has become an advisory body, whose role is largely confined to dealing with grievances,” Chipkin said.
“In clause after clause, the PSC is removed and its powers transferred to what it now calls an ‘executing authority’, meaning either the president, the minister of public service & administration or a portfolio minister in the national government or a member of the executive council at provincial level,” he said of the shift in the vision of the PSC between the early 1993 draft and the 1996 constitution.
Another change between the drafts was that politicians were given the power to appoint, promote and transfer employees in the public administration.
“What we see, therefore, expressed in technical provisions about the power of the PSC and the role of the executing authority is nothing less than another conception of the post-apartheid state. The form of the state that emerged after 1996 and through the late 1990s is based on the negation of the separation of political and administrative office.”
In 1996, ANC journal Umrabulo published a paper by former policy tsar Joel Netshitenzhe called “The National Democratic Revolution — Is it Still on Track?” He noted that “democratic forces in South Africa are not yet in control of all layers of power”.
Said Chipkin: “He was especially concerned about the public service and mooted, tentatively, the idea of the ANC making ‘strategic deployments’ into the civil service, the army, police and intelligence services. Within a year these ideas had hardened.”
And so “cadre deployment” was born.
“What was emerging in the ANC in the late 1990s was a deep scepticism of bureaucracy. At the very least, the political culture de-emphasised questions of administration and privileged the imperative to exercise political control over departments and officials,” Chipkin said.
In the early days, the appointment of skilled administrators such as Lesetja Kganyago as director-general in the National Treasury masked the insidious role this scepticism of an independent administration would later play.
“The move to limit and even erase the field of administration in the post-apartheid state was not a consequence, therefore, of neglect, nor did it just happen in passing, as if by accident. It reflected the rise in government and in policy circles of a certain idea of the state,” Chipkin said.
Where he halted in his analysis was with what transpired as the ANC became a broad-based movement and began drawing in members and leaders with particular interests. As the calibre of politicians inside the ANC declined, the calibre of administrators declined in tandem, culminating in Fikeni’s exposition of a state run by administrators beholden to outside interests.
The power of appointment
Wits School of Governance professor Alex van den Heever says there is another area in which the constitution enables the distortion of the public service. This is through the vast powers accorded to the president, to appoint not only ministers but senior public servants, from the public protector to the national director of public prosecutions, the national police commissioner and the commissioner of Sars.
Despite the extensive evidence before the Zondo commission that this was a key enabler of state capture during Zuma’s tenure, nothing has been done to reform this.
He says Zuma did not create the advantage accorded to him over appointments which enabled state capture, he simply exploited what was already there.
Van den Heever says the constitution need not change to neutralise the power of the president over these appointments. Rather, legislation should be put in place to ensure that the president’s decisions can face review and legal scrutiny. However, there is no such legislation in the offing.
Creating a truly insulated and professional public service will require more than Ramaphosa’s three pieces of legislation. It will require bolder reforms aimed at dismantling the cynical view the ANC adopted towards state administration in the 1990s. It will require, in other words, a reset of the South African state.
Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
