JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: Politicians remove senior officials to make 1 + 1 = 3

The recent economic policy debacle in Britain is a reminder of what happens when a politician removes a head of a department for political reasons and also sidesteps due process. SA has suffered from both in the recent past.

On his first day as chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister), Kwasi Kwarteng sacked Sir Tom Scholar, head of the treasury. Kwarteng’s move came after Prime Minister Liz Truss denounced treasury “orthodoxy” during her campaign for the premiership. A few days later, Kwarteng announced a package of measures to boost the economy, including support for energy bills and abolishing a 45% tax on annual income of more than £150,000.

The package roiled financial markets, forcing the Bank of England to intervene “to restore orderly market conditions” and reduce the risk of lending by the financial sector to businesses and households. Kwarteng was eventually forced to withdraw the abolition of the 45% tax rate.

The director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, described Kwarteng’s tax cuts as the biggest package in 50 years that was announced “without even a semblance of an effort to make the public finance numbers add up”.

“Instead, the plan seems to be to borrow large sums at increasingly expensive rates, put government debt on an unsustainable rising path, and hope that we get better growth. This marks such a dramatic change in the direction of economic policymaking that some of the longer-serving cabinet ministers might be worried about getting whiplash.”

He added that Kwarteng had avoided scrutiny by presenting a budget in all but name, without accompanying forecasts from the office for budget responsibility.

It’s clear that Kwarteng and his boss, Truss, saw Scholar as a stumbling block to their plan. SA public policymaking has suffered from similar behaviour by politicians who resort to removing senior officials they see as a stumbling block to their policy proposals. In addition, the removal of senior officials has had nothing to do with policy decisions but reflects the need by a politician for a pliant official who will parcel out contracts to their favoured ones.

The unstable interface between the political and administrative arms of the state was identified by the National Planning Commission in 2012 as one of the contributory factors to unevenness in the capacity and performance of municipal, provincial and national governments.

Other than tension that’s motivated by corruption, political principals can also react very badly when they are outclassed intellectually by officials. This isn’t unique to government, or SA for that matter. It happens in the private sector too, where a CEO may be surrounded by a team of executives who are more knowledgeable and experienced than him or her, particularly concerning the constituent parts of the company. Instead of drawing on that knowledge and experience, a CEO may resent  these colleagues and eventually force them out of the company.

This sort of behaviour is most pronounced in government, the reason being that politicians regard themselves as being in office to deliver on their party’s agenda. They therefore regard any advice from the policy experts (the officials), especially if it differs from what a minister has in mind, as an obstacle to the achievement of the party agenda.

That’s why the planning commission called for the building of a professional public service that would serve the government but at the same time be “sufficiently autonomous to be insulated from political patronage”. The commission called for a balance between the need for public servants to be responsive to the priorities of the government of the day and the insulation of the administrative machinery from undue political pressures.

Some politicians don’t take kindly to being “outranked intellectually” by officials, something that the late British politician and business person Edmund Dell once described as normal. “It is a regular requirement on officials to put the incoherent impulses of their political masters into an intellectually respectable form,” Dell explained in The Chancellors.

Ken Clarke, who was chancellor of the exchequer from 1993 to 1997, describes a similar vibe within the treasury. “Intellectually, the treasury was the most impressive government department in which I ever served, and Terry Burns (who was permanent secretary then) gave it splendid informal but formidable leadership. I encouraged constant debate and, in striking contrast to my experience at the home office, everybody eagerly joined in and vigorously argued their case,” Clarke wrote in Kind of Blue: A Political Memoir.

But such vigorous argument and having their viewpoint challenged by a junior official often rubs political principals up the wrong way, resulting in unhealthy tension between a minister and the officials.

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.