During the course of January, I talked to as many SA senior public servants as were prepared to give me their time. Some worked in large national departments, others in various provinces. From these interviews came a troubling story that recurred several times.
I am going to tell one of those stories, protecting my source by being vague. Suffice it to say that she is a woman in a senior managerial role in a large provincial department somewhere in SA.
My informant began in her current role two years ago. Among the staff who reported to her were people who had to prepare memos for meetings, write minutes and draft action plans. Within a couple of weeks, she found that some of the documents crossing her desk were so poorly written as to be incomprehensible. So she sent them back and instructed that they be better drafted.
After about a month on the job my informant sensed that disgruntlement among her subordinates was growing. She was new, and didn’t want to get into a nasty battle so early on. So she stopped sending documents back and began redrafting them herself, despite an already heavy workload.
A few months later, her position now more secure, she thought she’d try again and started sending tardy work back for rewriting. This time there was more than incipient disgruntlement. Her staff, she was made to understand, were preparing to go to war with her.
And so she retreated once more. By now it was some time in the winter of 2023, and ChatGPT-4 had come into the world. As an experiment she started feeding the scarcely comprehensible documents crossing her desk to the new AI now at her disposal.
It didn’t work so well at first, but she kept experimenting, and by early 2024 she had it pretty much nailed down. A useless piece of work could be made fit for purpose in less than a minute.
And that is what she has been doing ever since. She is handed substandard documents, she gets an AI assistant to fix them, and they go out into the world. Her staff either don’t care or have never noticed.
Once my informant had told me her story I began asking leading questions to the other senior public servants I was talking to. And, sure enough, I discovered that she was not alone. There were variations, but the essential tale was the same: senior managers getting AI to do the work in lieu of confronting poor performers.
It is a tyranny of the incompetent over their hard-working bosses, a triumph of people who have no interest in service over people with a passion for it.
The development economist Albert Hirschman once described the relationship between failing public bureaucracies and the people they are meant to serve as a “monopoly-tyranny … an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy…”
But this is worse than that. It is a tyranny of the incompetent over their hard-working bosses, a triumph of people who have no interest in service over people with a passion for it.
One can conjure up the situation escalating until it reaches a condition of absurdity. Imagine an SA in which hundreds of managers secretly get AI to do the work of their subordinates; they clock in to work each day blissfully unaware that their memos and agendas are being routed to a data centre 15,000km away, where they are cleaned up, made presentable to the world, and routed back to Pretoria.
When asked in an interview last year why SA’s institutions perform poorly, Eskom chair Mteto Nyati said the problem was too much deference to those in authority. Unqualified people are appointed to leadership positions, he said, and then we are too polite to challenge them.
The problem may well be the very opposite. Incompetent leaders are given deference not because they are leaders but because they are incompetent. It is the talented leaders who are attacked and bullied and forced secretly to turn to machines.
It is an epic problem and I’m not certain it is even acknowledged, let alone addressed. Bureaucratic leaders unburden themselves to people like me in a whisper and then go back to the comfort of those AI machines.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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