Luthuli House in Johannesburg. (Photo: Gallo Images | Flickr | iStock) Those of us a little long in the tooth (moi) will remember the British satirical comedy series “Yes, Minister” that aired in the early 1980s. It was set mostly in the office of a fictional minister of something called the Department of Administrative Affairs in Whitehall, the centre of the British bureaucracy. The minister, Jim Hacker, was ably assisted by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, and when I say ably assisted, obviously I mean surreptitiously and repeatedly stabbed in the back.
The name of the series was a joke in itself. The civil servants repeatedly said, “Yes, Minister”, by which they meant, “No, absolutely not – not under any circumstances, don’t be nuts”.
At one point, Hacker says to Sir Humphrey, “Do you see it as part of your job to help ministers make fools of themselves?” To which he replies, “Well, I never met one that needed any help”. Drier than my wife’s martinis.
The series was meant to reflect how power works and, simultaneously, how much disdain with which political appointees were treated – sometimes rightly – by career civil servants.
There is a saying in some civil services that the service has a long tradition of apolitical professionalism, “so we really don’t care about which ministers work for us”.
In the best of all possible worlds, bureaucrats are appointed on merit and are apolitical. They are there not to decide policy – that’s a question for the political process – but are there to work diligently to put government policy into practice, whatever it is. That is the idea. It never happens.
As a matter of realistic politics, politicians like to be surrounded by like-minded bureaucrats whom they can trust to bring their ideas to bear. And bureaucrats often see a possibility of promotion if they can somehow convince politicians they are on their side.
So, all over the world, there are different rules and traditions to somehow make these conflicting pressures or tendencies into a functioning (or not) system.
In the US, heads of departments are typically explicitly political appointments, and many ambassadorial posts are too. Hence they change every time an administration changes.
In Europe, the system is often more opaque. Some senior French bureaucrats are appointed by the president, according to specific legislation, while some are not.
In Germany, the civil service has a long tradition of independence that goes back to Bismarck, although during the war years, that all got turned upside down and had to be very carefully and specifically reestablished after the war. Still, in Germany, senior civil servants are appointed by ministers from the ranks of the civil service.
In the real world, civil service appointments are often made in alignment with political inclinations.
In the UK, civil servants are technically accountable to the Crown, not to the political system – an interesting utility in a country without a written Constitution but with a monarch. Apart from a team of private secretaries, who are civil servants, ministers also have “special advisors”, who are not.
Of course, in communist countries, the party is very specifically in control of all appointments to the civil service. But even in countries like China, where this is the case, there are times when public irritation with the selection of unqualified political appointees gets intense and some semblance of professionalism and merit advancement in the civil service is applied.
But generally, party loyalty comes first, and you can often see that in the terrible and arbitrary decisions made by bureaucrats.
In short, it’s all a bit of a mixed bag. So, what then do we make of the ANC’s claim that cadre deployment is completely normal and even practised by opposition parties when they get into power, like the DA?
Specifically, in response to the DA’s failed bid in the Gauteng Division of the High Court to have cadre deployment declared unconstitutional, ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri said it was “a common feature of democratic practice around the world”.
Bhengu-Motsiri was echoing the statements of President Cyril Ramaphosa to the Zondo Commission when he said: “Cadre deployment should not be inconsistent with the principles of fairness, transparency and merit in appointing individuals to public entities.” He was, however, concerned there were weaknesses in its practical implementation.
Well, this week we got to see some of those implementation weaknesses up close.
The first was the typically chaotic way the cadre deployment committee was managed. It all seemed to happen on a WhatsApp group, complete with seemingly random calls for candidates for this or that position. Records for the group were sporadic and scanty, and years of records were “lost”.
A News24 report says the “records suggest a haphazard process characterised by jokes and repeated hurried attempts to convene meetings. The lack of organisation in the committee often culminated in numerous meetings being cancelled. It happened so often that, following multiple attempts to convene meetings, one member joked: ‘What time are you cancelling the deployment committee meeting?’”
But when the committee didn’t get its way, there was hell to pay.
The late deputy secretary-general of the ANC, Jessie Duarte, felt no compunction in firing off an angry and demanding letter to Justice Minister Ronald Lamola, no less, in March 2020 when the ANC’s preferred candidate was not appointed to the Judicial Service Commission. Shows where the power lies – and it’s not with the minister.
The newly released record confirms what the Zondo Commission found, which was that Ramaphosa had lied both when he downplayed the scope of the historic decisions of the committee, and when he told the commission it did not make recommendations for judicial appointments.
The committee, it turns out, absolutely controlled the appointments of almost every senior position, from Cabinet to relatively minor departments to the parastatals. Everything.
It’s no wonder the ANC seems unable to appoint a Transnet CEO for months, despite the organisation disintegrating and jobs being lost by the hundreds as a result.
Judge Zondo pointed out the biggest problem for the ANC’s cadre deployment system: it’s unconstitutional.
“The Constitution envisages a public administration that maintains a high standard of professional ethics: that is efficient, economic and effective in its use of resources and that is impartial, fair, equitable and without bias,” Zondo found.
But clearly it’s a bit of a grey area because the commission’s findings were found not sufficient to declare the body illegal by the Gauteng Division of the High Court in Pretoria. We will see.
For the ANC to demonstrate that loyalty isn’t the only criterion and that professional qualifications were also a consideration, all it had to do was point to recommendations of people who were outside the party, non-aligned, or even in opposition. But it hasn’t yet been able to point to a single case.
Almost the entire South African diplomatic corps consists of former politicians, but there is not a single former EFF or DA member among them.
You can look at this the other way around too: in a host of departments and parastatals, people were appointed without the first clue of how to run the organisations, or perhaps any organisation. And you can tell that’s the case because the organisations concerned have simply collapsed under the weight of rank incompetence.
A good example is Themba Mhambi, the chair of roads parastatal Sanral who was by profession an English lecturer and who, according to insiders I have spoken to, knows absolutely nothing about anything to do with engineering, let alone building roads.
In response to civil servants trying to explain the dynamics of the construction industry, Mhambi got angry with their “insubordination”, and suspended the chief financial officer and head of supply chain management, and the previous CEO left early. The organisation has spent about half its capex budget for the past four years.
Herein lies the problem with deploying cadres; you get loyalty, but it costs you competence. And the decline in competence affects service delivery. And that, normally at least, hurts you in the polls. DM