South Africa codified the arrangements with which society would govern itself for the first time in a constitution in 1910. South African constitutionalism has always been about creating political stability and policy certainty for the survival of its economy.
During colonial rule, Britain's primary public benefited from the economic stability the South African constitution guaranteed. This created a condition where the policies of successive governments were about South Africa and not of South Africa, and where it was for South Africa. To ensure that the administration and the bureaucracy, as the mind of the state, loyally executed the policies of the Imperial Council, the public service was identified as a critical enabler.
One of the earliest institutions to be established was the Public Service Commission in 1911. Its core mandate was to commission in the public service, and on behalf of the Crown, people who would be servants of the benefiting “public” and then “publics” that were residents, with race as a key determinant of access. At the time, political power dynamics were an outcome of a war, and there were clear victors, whence the governor-general was the de facto head of state in whom the executive and administrative authority of the colony was vested.
Public administration would, for a while, be about the sustainability of colonial rule and, by extension, the interests of the British Empire. How the bureaucracy was imagined and resourced reflected the political economy interests of the Crown government. Public accountability was subject to the governor-general, who represented the empire. The allocative and distributive prowess of the public administration system made it a vocation with the public power to define and determine the livelihoods of society. This set a template for how the public service would be theorised, structured and resourced by successive governments today.
The government’s human face and mind can only be experienced through the public service. Inevitably, public servants become people of interest to those who command political or other power in society. The need by political coalitions or parties to ensure that those commissioned in the public service would be amenable to their policy intents grew in sophistication equal to the demands on the public service. The public service became the terrain of secret societies, cults and ideology because it influenced policy execution. With the maturity and normalisation of race-based public administration practices, theories and algorithms of apartheid policies, the innocence of norms and standards underpinning public service and administration were compromised. The normative appeal of guidelines instructing public administration got caught up in the competition between the prerogatives of public service transformation and the need to build a modern post-apartheid state. The appetite to influence who presides over the bureaucratic discretion of a post-apartheid state, as it happened in a postcolonial state since 1961, grew commensurate with the exigencies of making the post-1996 constitution liberation promise realisable.
This foregrounded the deployment versus commissioning debate about the public service. In the context of deployment, those deployed go into the public service with a mandate from the centres that deployed them. On the other hand, those commissioned into the public service will rely on the policies of the commissioning authority to determine their scope of influence, responsibility, and accountability. Being commissioned is a state institutional matter because those in the service of the public assume an organ of stateness which can only be exercised in terms of the constitution, legislation or assigned public power. Being deployed is a political party matter and is inextricably linked with the political term of office. Thus, it is vulnerable to the instability associated with the change of priorities of the government of the day. Notwithstanding, the constitution does recognise the significance of loyalty to the government of the day within the confines of the constitution as the supreme law of the land.
The vocation of politics, a global phenomenon, has compromised the nobleness of being commissioned and elevated the importance of the obligation to be deployed within the public service. With the administrative authority of most states not clearly defined and derived from where the executive authority vests, public service as a career option has always been vulnerable to the quality of the executive authorities a society is exposed to. As constitutions reflect the political emotion of a society when they were enacted, the abundance of benevolent leadership often lands societies in conditions where policies and practices are built around the cohort of leaders whose interests go beyond their incumbency. Cadre deployment as a transitionary measure to attune the public service towards a nonracial, non-sexist, united and democratic South Africa assumed a continuous supply of the inaugural quality of cadres.
Asked about cadre development, a former director-general accounts that at inception, South Africa was spoiled for choice in the quality of cadres it required to deploy. He mentions that the type of executive authorities they were exposed to understood the importance of having cadres that would not interrogate their policies but would require space to determine policies to make government-of-the-day policies realisable. The posture was the betterment of the lives of the people. The supply side of cadres from higher education institutions was still etched in, producing people who would make any governing system workable. Hence, apartheid was opposed politically but, administratively, it remained intact until the supply side started to produce more transitionocrats than bureaucrats.
In democracies where the political party’s influence is as acute as in South Africa, the quality of party leadership will determine the pulse of public service. Depending on which political tendency assumes power, including internal to the political parties themselves, the (political or otherwise) habits of the dominant governing elite will become society’s values. The questions of fairness, transparency, accountability and even morality will always follow those commissioned or deployed independently of their personal integrity and forthrightness.
Matured democracies, those that are further from conflicts that preceded their establishment, have dealt with this matter by building state bureaucracy as an institution of leadership. The civic duty virtue of being in the public service has been codified into a “way of doing things” that those with political power would not have fear in appointing the best in society to be on the policy execution terrain of politics. Commissioning into public service assumes that a society's national or otherwise interests are a shared endeavour, irrespective of the political orientation you would have chosen.
Following the discourse on cadre deployment in South Africa, including the court decisions made, it is clear that those fighting about it agree about the correctness of commissioning the best into the public service. What seems to be at issue is who or what should be best for South Africa as a country and not a fiefdom or collection of fiefdoms outside a national standard. There is a national consensus on the need to renew the orientation of political parties towards the state and functionaries of the state towards government responsibility. The civil service character of the public service, its posture as the enforcer of all constitutional laws and acting in the nation's interest might be the discourse South Africa needs to entertain.
The constitution has set standards expected of public servants, the apex one being the ability to execute the government’s policies of the day loyally. These policies would, in any case, not be anything inconsistent with the country's supreme law. The need to deploy might be mitigated by ensuring that the supply side of public servants churns quality to the standard and expectations of the constitution. This is a role few if any, political parties can fulfil in a democracy like that of South Africa. The professionalisation framework proposed by the government is a fresh start. Producing career bureaucrats requires a beyond-party politics effort with sufficient private sector support. The time to interrogate the necessity for public service and administration to be under an executive authority instead of a Chapter 9 or 10 institution might have arrived with the litigation warfare going on. The question we should ask ourselves as South Africans are to what extent have the conditions obtained in 1994 changed to necessitate a return to commissioning the best into the public service.
*Mathebula is the founder of The Thinc Foundation
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