Open letter to Cyril Ramaphosa: Major reforms in the public service are critical to the future of South Africa

Dear President Cyril Ramaphosa,

On Monday, 1 March 2021, in your presidential letter to the nation, you reiterated your administration’s commitment to build an efficient, capable and ethical state free from corruption. At the centre of this commitment you put the need to professionalise the public service, to ensure the people who staff it are skilled, selfless and honest, that they are insulated from undue political interference and devoted to serving – over and above any specific party or interest group – the people and the democratic law of South Africa.

Public service reform, along these lines, is crucial to the future of our country.

The problem we’re facing is clear. South Africa’s public service institutions give broad and largely unconstrained powers of appointment and removal to political office bearers. A legacy of the early years of the democratic transition, these were shaped to maximise political direction over what was, at the time, still an apartheid public administration. The objective has been achieved; the state has been transformed. Yet, the relevant norms, rules and procedures continue to outlive their purpose.

These norms, rules and procedures favour personal and political connections over expertise and integrity. They allow politicians to appoint associates across democratically defined administrative checks and balances, and to sideline principled public servants who insist on following the law, facilitating inappropriate political interference in operational functions, and corruption. Over decades, by layering political networks animated by these practices into the administration, institutions that once served to democratise the state have now come to undermine democratic control.

The evidence for these propositions is overwhelming. The State Capture crisis provides a vivid example. Journalists and researchers have revealed similar processes in provincial and local government. In our own work, we routinely encounter this issue. The pervasive breakdown of control is made visible annually in Auditor-General reports. It is attested in countless news media exposés, whistle-blower statements, official investigations and court documents. It is indicated by the slow, disorderly and often intractable character of critical policy and implementation processes, and by the alarming deterioration of systems responsible for providing our people with basic services.

The presidential letter acknowledges that 27 years into democracy, there are serious problems in South Africa’s public service. To address these, it highlights the draft National Implementation Framework towards the Professionalisation of the Public Service. The letter’s great virtue is that it does not express an all-too-easy pledge to exercise “political will” and “do things better” within existing institutions. Political conduct is enabled and constrained, presented with incentives and disincentives, opportunities and risks, by institutions. The framework, recognising this, contains a series of practical reforms to correct issues in the institutions themselves.

The proposals are wide ranging and welcome, but they don’t go far enough.

The most important aspect of any process of public service professionalisation is how powers are allocated across processes of appointment and removal of public servants. If political office bearers in South Africa continue to hold exceedingly broad and unchecked powers, then there is no reason to believe they won’t continue to exercise them as they have, with predictable consequences for administrative professionalism.

A crowd of demonstrators carry a white flag as they approach the police cordon at a settlement in Reiger Park, Johannesburg. (Photo: Nadine Hutton / Bloomberg via Getty Images)