LUCKY MATHEBULA | South Africa must return to the basics of public administration - TimesLIVE

“South Africa has become a graveyard of progressive policies ... a political economy of inefficiency is settling in” — Prof Somadoda Fikeni

Prof Somadoda Fikeni’s testimony before the Madlanga commission should be read as more than another expert intervention in South Africa’s recurring theatre of commissions.

It was, in substance, a reminder that the country’s crisis of governance is not only a crisis of politics, ethics or leadership. It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, a crisis of public administration and management.

For too long, the dysfunction of the South African state has been explained through familiar categories: political ineptitude, institutional mistrust, constitutional illiteracy, factionalism, corruption and the refusal of politicians to respect the boundary between politics and administration.

These explanations are not wrong. The problem is that they are incomplete. They often miss what Fikeni described, with useful precision, as the political economy of inefficiency.

At the heart of this political economy is a long war against systems: against standard operating procedures, against rules, against institutional memory, against constitutional discipline and against the patient routines through which capable states become capable.

A normative state depends on the supremacy of rules over personalities. A prerogative state, by contrast, depends on discretion, proximity to power and the arbitrary will of those who occupy office.

South Africa’s democratic project has often spoken of the capable state as if it were primarily a political aspiration. Yet the functional mind of any state is its bureaucracy. Without a professional, patriotic, meritocratic and rule-bound public administration, even the most progressive policy becomes a promise without an operating system.

The apartheid state was morally illegitimate, but administratively efficient in executing its own unjust purposes. Democratic South Africa had to dismantle that order. But in the process of de-apartheidisation, it too often weakened the very administrative disciplines required to realise the liberation promise.

In correcting the inherited architecture of apartheid governance, the democratic state did not always build a sufficiently firm normative foundation for what would replace it.

The challenge was never merely to change the faces of the bureaucracy. It was to build a democratic state whose systems could serve constitutional citizenship. That required standards, procedures, institutional memory, accountability and a public-service ethos.

Instead, too many parts of the state allowed transformation to become administratively unmoored. In correcting the inherited architecture of apartheid governance, the democratic state did not always build a sufficiently firm normative foundation for what would replace it.

Fikeni’s account demonstrates that without a common, statewide doctrine of public administration — shared across departments, municipalities, entities and spheres of government — a country is forever administratively adrift.

In such a condition, the state becomes vulnerable to the dominant forces in society, especially political parties and their internal factions. Where public administration has no common grammar, politics supplies one.

Where officials do not inherit a disciplined practice of public duty, they borrow the habits, loyalties and anxieties of the forces around them. The result is not merely weak administration; it is a state whose institutional centre cannot hold.

For public servants, such conditions breed a particular kind of institutional captivity. If they do not know what to do, they often do more of what they know. They retreat into inherited reflexes, factional scripts, bureaucratic routines, survival strategies and informal loyalties.

In time, they construct their own psychic prisons and lock themselves therein. The past 30 years have created many such prisons: prisons of fear, patronage, procedural evasion, political dependency and administrative improvisation. A capable democratic state cannot be built by officials trapped in such enclosures.

The consequences are visible across the state. Before the 1996 constitutional dispensation took full institutional shape, South Africa inherited fragmented municipal jurisdictions, multiple centres of executive authority and scattered accounting structures across public entities. In the democratic era, this complexity required disciplined integration.

Instead, in many places, it produced new fiefdoms. Offices became personal kingdoms. Titles of public responsibility became names of individuals. “Chief”, “commander”, “leader” and “my leader” replaced the impersonal authority of law, process and institutional duty.

This is why Fikeni’s characterisation of South Africa as a graveyard of progressive policies is so devastating. The country does not lack good policy language. Its shelves are full of plans, frameworks, strategies and turn-around documents. What it lacks, too often, is the administrative machinery to convert policy into credible action.

The burial ground is not only made of failed policies; it is also staffed by those who, knowingly or otherwise, form part of the value chain through which public purpose is delayed, diverted or defeated.

The events that triggered the Madlanga commission, including Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi’s public disclosures, should therefore be understood as a symptom rather than an exception. They point to a deeper administrative disorder in which honest public servants are forced into acts of institutional desperation, while others implicated in questionable conduct continue to circulate through positions of authority.

This is how impunity reproduces itself: not only through corruption, but through appointments, promotions and protections that normalise the abnormal.

The Madlanga commission may yet expose specific networks, names and transactions. But its deeper contribution will depend on whether South Africa is willing to confront the administrative conditions that make capture possible. If we reduce the problem to a few villains, we will miss the system that enables them.

The fight against corruption is not only a fight for cleaner politics. It is a fight to rebuild public administration as a disciplined constitutional craft.

South Africa’s public-intellectual task is therefore to insist on a simple but neglected truth: no democratic state can govern progressively if it administers casually.

The country must return to the basics — merit, systems, standards, constitutional discipline, institutional memory and public service. Without these, every reform will become another slogan, every commission another archive, and every promise of a capable state another casualty in the graveyard of good intentions.