Shortly before the May general election, the National Assembly passed two bills — the Public Administration Management Amendment Bill and the Public Service Amendment Bill — ostensibly to depoliticise and professionalise the public service.
The department of public service & administration released a directive soon after the poll to implement the 2022 National Framework on the Professionalisation of the Civil Service, and the New South Institute published two documents on the same subject, a white paper — ‘Beyond Political Discretion: Reforming SA’s Senior Civil Service’ — and a policy brief, ‘Towards a Merit-Based Senior Civil Service: Strategies for Reform in SA’.
The former was intended to provide in-depth analysis of the historical and contemporary challenges facing SA’s senior civil service, while the latter offers concise, actionable recommendations for immediate implementation aimed at professionalising the senior civil service.
The word “professionalisation” in the context of the civil service refers to a fair selection processes to choose the most competent senior appointees, regular performance evaluations, and ensuring those who are selected are not political ideologues, incompetent or corrupt in the execution of their duties.
ANC cadres and others of similar ideological bent began to dominate the civil service
Senior civil servants are defined as distinguished government employees who include directors-general, their deputies and leaders of all state-owned entities and other government agencies, including Transnet, Eskom, the International Trade Administration Commission and the Competition Commission.
The rise of the Herenigde Nationale Party, which took power in 1948 with a minority of the white vote due to the first-past-the-post constituency electoral system, resulted in Afrikaner nationalism characterised by white Afrikaners being given preference for jobs in the civil service.
Job requirements such as being fluent in Afrikaans were among the tools used to make access to employment by the state easier for Afrikaners, and harder for the rest of the population. By 1968, the mainstream civil service had become notoriously inefficient, with unfilled vacancies in the top positions because there was a shortage of qualified Afrikaners who could serve in those roles.
When democratic governance was attained in 1994 there was a serious lack of trust between the new ANC government and whites in the civil service, particularly politicised senior civil servants. The ANC was far from confident that they would act in support of its political ideology and vision. To address this, in 1997 it introduced a cadre policy and deployment strategy, in terms of which the government, particularly ANC cabinet ministers, would recommend the appointment of people with similar political ideology to the ANC in senior civil service roles.
Consequently, ANC cadres and others of similar ideological bent began to dominate the civil service. Unfortunately, this again also resulted in the appointment of senior civil servants who were not necessarily the most qualified or competent, since competence played a secondary role in the selection process.
As with the Nationalists, this began to reflect in poor service delivery. There has been a gradual deterioration in the quality and availability of public goods and services (water, electricity, rail services, education, healthcare, sewage and solid waste disposal), and many state-owned enterprises began to fail.
From the time Jacob Zuma became head of state in 2009, the cadre policy was also used to fight ANC factional battles and grow political loyalties within the party. This led to a further decline in service delivery and state-owned entities, and a rise in popular protest action.
Inevitably under these circumstances, when Cyril Ramaphosa replaced Zuma as president there were wholesale changes in key civil service positions, as the new executive appointed people to senior positions in the public service who they trusted and believed would be loyal to Ramaphosa’s vision.
The 2024 general elections are also set to result in further changes in key civil service positions, with some political parties within the new government of national unity (GNU) already asking for senior personnel changes. The DA, for example, clearly stated its intention to replace the senior civil servants in all of the ministries and state-owned entities (parastatals) that will be the responsibility of its ministers in the new government.
Though justified given the politicised nature of most government departments, this is a concern because regular wholesale changes among senior civil servants disrupt policy implementation, remove experienced old hands and detract from institutional memory. Moreover, if the GNU is dissolved some time within the next five years due to disagreements among its constituent political parties, more such changes and disruption can be expected.
To professionalise the senior civil service, the government is now expected to set up a specialised panel that will be responsible for the recruitment, management and performance evaluation of senior civil servants. As a means to secure confidence in the panel, it should comprise experts nominated by the political parties that make up the GNU. If the political leadership prefers an independent panel, experts who are not politically aligned could be invited to constitute the panel.
The panel should include individuals with the skills to evaluate senior civil servants in each government ministry and agency according to their ability. This implies that it should be a broad panel that functions under different specialist branches such as parastatal oversight, national security, legal affairs, economics, innovation and training.
Establishing such a panel would lead to the appointment of the most qualified and competent individuals to serve as senior civil servants. Once appointed, each senior civil servant should be issued with a non-political job description that highlights the duties and targets required of them in their new role.
As a means to ensure civil servants are performing as required, the panel should do performance evaluations once or twice per year. The evaluations would analyse whether the appointees have been reaching their targets and fulfilling expectations. This would go a long way towards reducing corruption and other incidences of abuse of office.
The panel could also recommend the best-performing senior civil servants for leadership roles in other government departments and state-owned enterprises. On the other hand, if the panel identifies poor performance, negligence or corruption, it should have the power to immediately suspend or dismiss the appointee.
The Centre For Development and Enterprise argues that such a panel should employ retired judges who can be used when senior civil servants are accused of corruption or unethical practices (“The right people in top public sector jobs can boost growth”, June 25). The judges would then serve to recommend an immediate dismissal if the case against the appointee indicates on the balance of probabilities that they are guilty.
This would be useful because criminal investigations into senior civil servants can take years to be finalised, while the perpetrator continues in their role. Criminal investigations, with a higher burden of proof, often result in guilty parties being let off due to either a shortage of hard evidence, excessive delays or the perpetrators bribing investigators.
The panel can also be responsible for ensuring that the senior civil servants regularly receive training on the latest trends and technologies in their fields. These technologies may include artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology, for example. Once trained, the senior civil servants can then promote the implementation of such technologies within their respective government departments.
Ideally, the training sessions should encourage integration and networking of senior civil servants from different government departments. This would give rise to a spirit of competitiveness and excellence among them. Networking would also increase the cost of poor performance, since underachievement would be known to their peers.
• Tutani is a political economy analyst.
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