Late last year, while preparing to teach an undergraduate class, I reread a 2010 essay on public healthcare in SA by the sociologist Karl von Holdt. He was a long-serving board member of Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, and over the preceding years had visited countless other hospitals. He knew from first-hand experience what he was writing about.
The portrait he painted was distressing. Skill and expertise, he wrote, were often regarded by healthcare managers as threatening. In one instance a hospital CEO and his entire team were removed because they were too attentive to the needs of the hospital’s clinicians. They were replaced by a new team with the explicit mandate to keep doctors under control.
We all understand that bureaucracies are complex machines and sometimes end up serving perverse purposes. But a hospital that regards doctors as enemies because they are experts has gone horribly astray.
In searching for why this happened, Von Holdt argued that expertise in some institutions was seen as synonymous with whiteness, even when the experts were black; that specialists were understood as an oppressive colonial presence to be combated and if possible vanquished.
It is strange reading his essay in 2025. Since its publication 15 years ago SA has gone through the presidency of Jacob Zuma. Among the many features of his presidency, he gave this grassroots bureaucratic movement against expertise presidential backing. For an essential feature of Zuma’s project of state capture was a frontal assault on technocratic talent.
The discursive weapons he wielded in this assault were brutal. When the technocrats were white they were denounced as racists. When they weren’t, they were ridiculed as “clever blacks”.
Seven years after the Zuma presidency it is clear that the damage he has done is permanent. Among a legion of other destructive legacies he has left behind a toxic ideology, already rising when Von Holdt wrote his piece, but strengthened immeasurably by his presidency. What this ideology does, in essence, is lend bureaucratic incompetence a political voice.
It would be insulting to claim that incompetence in SA’s bureaucracy is ubiquitous. Scattered across the country are hospitals, schools, police stations and prisons that are supremely well run by inspirational leaders. They are golden, their value immeasurable. Those responsible for them should be singled out and celebrated. But they are far too rare. Incompetence is now systemic. It has its own voice, its own political ideology, its own canons of justification.
It also has an armoury of powerful weapons to destroy the careers of institutional reformers. I have heard so many chilling tales from the lips of SA bureaucratic leaders lately; that they are frightened of their own staff, that they are silent in the face of shoddy work for fear of the consequences of speaking; that trying to reform the organisations they lead is scarcely worth the trouble.
It is hard to exaggerate how wounding a defeat this is for SA. It is not just that the country has a poor civil service, but a civil service primed to fight for the perpetuation of its own poor performance. And this in a country failing to adequately educate its children, to care for the ill, to humanely house its prisoners.
SA does not need an Elon Musk, who has taken a hatchet to his country’s bureaucracy and begun hacking it to pieces. But what we do desperately need is a programme of institutional repair. One of the essential tools of that repair is an anti-Zuma: a charismatic leader who will combat the champions of incompetence as brutally as Zuma slew talent; a leader who will inspire gifted technocrats to want to work for the state and offer the political muscle to protect them.
Can Cyril Ramaphosa be that leader? Does he really want an efficient justice system if it will prosecute his allies? Does he want to get tough with the civil service if doing so threatens to make it a recruitment ground for Zuma’s MK party? He is SA’s president and the ANC’s president, and between those two positions a war is raging.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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