---
title: "Time to close the open till and end the era of the permanent politician"
description: "South Africa’s political system rewards politicians for staying in the job rather than delivering for the people who pay their salaries. We need a radical reset: treat public office as a finite tour of duty, with term limits, cooling-off periods and deferred pay that make leaving clean more rewarding than clinging to power."
type: "OpinionNewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "Opinionistas"
author: "Themba Dlamini"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/themba-dlamini/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2026-09-04-time-to-close-the-open-till-and-end-the-era-of-the-permanent-politician/"
published: "2026-09-04T14:20:20"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 2254
---

# Time to close the open till and end the era of the permanent politician

> South Africa’s political system rewards politicians for staying in the job rather than delivering for the people who pay their salaries. We need a radical reset: treat public office as a finite tour of duty, with term limits, cooling-off periods and deferred pay that make leaving clean more rewarding than clinging to power.

By Themba Dlamini · Published 4 September 2026, 16:20 SAST

## Content

Somewhere in South Africa this week, a boy in a Grade 11 blazer stands up at assembly to make his prefect-election speech.

He does not promise discipline. He promises a longer break. He promises music at lunch. He promises – to a roar that rattles the windows – that the tuck shop will give credit. He sits down to the loudest applause of the morning, and the teachers at the back of the hall exchange the look of people who will spend a year running a school around that applause.

We laugh because we recognise it. We recognise it because we have built a country on the same rule.

### A tour of duty, not a career

A politician’s job, as it is currently designed, has one performance measure: keep the job. We usually call this the pressure of re-election, but that name flatters the system, and in South Africa it is not even accurate. The real key performance indicator (KPI) is narrower and more revealing: remain employable by politics.

As an accountant, I would say we have written a performance contract with the wrong KPI in it, and then we act surprised every five years when the output matches the contract. This is not a comment on the character of the people who hold the job. It is a comment on the job.

The American version of this problem is a congressman who spends his career “getting stuff” for his district, because his employer is the district. Ours is worse, because our politician does not even need the district.

### The list, not the voter

At national and provincial level, South Africans do not elect people. We elect party lists. The individual MP’s seat depends not on what the voters of any place think of her, but on where the party places her on a piece of paper compiled in a room she was not in. Independents have been [allowed on national and provincial ballots since 2024](https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/president-ramaphosa-assents-electoral-amendment-bill), but the list remains the road to office for nearly everyone who gets there. Hold that picture: the voter pays the salary, but the party controls the career.

We have just watched what happens in that room. In the final days before the Electoral Commission of SA’s (IEC’s) registration deadline for the November elections, the governing party [lurched from emergency meeting to emergency meeting](https://www.theherald.co.za/news/2026-08-31-panic-after-claims-anc-failed-to-register-candidates-in-four-municipalities/) – not about water, not about potholes, but about the list itself: who was on it, who had been quietly removed from it, whose name made it into the system before five o’clock on Friday.

It [missed the deadline anyway](https://www.citizen.co.za/news/anc-risks-being-locked-out-of-municipal-races-iec-stands-firm-on-deadline/), as it did [in 2021](https://mg.co.za/politics/2021-09-06-iec-throws-anc-a-candidate-registration-lifeline/) – when a rearranged election timetable handed it a lifeline. This time the commission says the door is shut, and the party [stands to be locked out of contests it failed to register for](https://witness.co.za/news/2026/09/02/iec-stands-firm-as-2-274-candidates-face-election-exclusion/). Not one voter featured in the crisis. The entire national emergency was a fight over the piece of paper.

To be fair to the governing party: every party in this country runs the same list machinery. The others simply operated theirs more competently this cycle. The failure is the visible symptom; the design is the disease.

Follow the incentive. If my career depends on the list, my real employer is whoever compiles the list. My job is not to deliver to the public; it is to remain in favour. Nobody fights over a registration system at the last hour for a season of service. People fight like that over a livelihood.

Picture two councillors. The first is a ward councillor – the one office we still fill by electing an actual person – and she spends her term getting the water back on in her ward: fighting the district municipality, sitting in the technical meetings, learning what a pressure valve costs.

The second sits on the party’s PR list, attends every branch meeting, and seconds every motion. Here is the trap: everything above them both – the mayoral committee, the provincial legislature, Parliament – runs through the party.

From the first rung of ambition upward, the taps stop counting and the branch minutes start. Ask yourself which habits a talented young person learns on the way up.

Cadre deployment is not a corruption of this system. It is the system working as designed. Design explains the pattern; it does not absolve the person – nobody is deployed into a tender against their will. But once the party is the employer, the party will place its people wherever there is a salary: Parliament, a provincial legislature, a metro council, a water board, an SOE. Deployment is what an employer does with staff.

Here is what the career ladder looks like at full stretch. In 2024, the country watched former executives of its largest state-owned enterprises – men whose conduct fills chapters of the State Capture commission’s report – [take up seats in Parliament as honourable members](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-08-28-state-capture-era-bosses-brian-molefe-lucky-montana-and-siyabonga-gama-sworn-in-as-mps/), some [within weeks of court appearances](https://mg.co.za/politics/2024-08-28-state-capture-suspects-sworn-in-as-mk-party-mps/).

It did not merely fail to stop them on the way down. It welcomed them back up. The ballot is a promise. The audit is the receipt. I have worked at both ends of that sentence – inside the Electoral Commission, where the promise is administered, and the Auditor-General’s office, where the receipts are filed – and I can tell you what you notice after enough years of reading them. The receipts are signed by the same hands. And the hands are never once sent home.

### The proposal: a tour of duty

The people who wrote [the early republican constitution](https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/documents/1776-1865/pennsylvania-constitution-1776.html) imagined public office as something you did for a while and then left. You served, you went home, you farmed or traded or taught. Nobody imagined a person whose entire working life would be spent trying to get elected to something.

We should recover that idea – and if the problem is that we turned public office into employment, then the fix must read like what it honestly is: the termination clauses of a different contract. Not the half measure we already have. South Africa limits the president to two terms, and nobody else to anything. That is a lock on the front door of a house with no walls.

Three clauses would change the incentive.

First, term limits that follow the person, not the office. Two terms in any legislature – national, provincial or municipal – and then you are done with legislatures. Not two terms in Parliament followed by two in a province followed by a mayoralty. The point is to end the ladder, not to reroute it.

Second, a real cooling-off period. No former legislator or executive member may sit on the board of any public entity, SOE or regulator for five years after leaving office. Today, nothing meaningful stands between voting on an SOE’s mandate on Friday and chairing it on Monday. That is not a revolving door; it is an open-plan office.

Third, pay people to leave clean. This is where the accountant in me takes over from the columnist. Hold back a meaningful slice of every public representative’s package as a deferred benefit that vests only five years after they exit – and is forfeited entirely on any conviction for corruption or any finding of undisclosed interests.

Today the money in politics all flows toward staying in and cashing out. Reverse it. Make the single most profitable thing a politician can do to serve two clean terms and go home. Add a paid-lobbying ban for the same five years, and the pavement outside Parliament stops being a marketplace.

### The objections, honestly

The strongest objection is not the one usually made. It is this: term limits can make politicians worse. A representative who cannot face the voters again has less reason to fear them in her final term. A politician whose career expires in 10 years has every reason to spend the tenth cultivating whoever will employ him in the eleventh.

And if elected members rotate out quickly while party officials, lobbyists and permanent insiders remain, power does not disappear; it migrates to the people nobody can vote against. This is the hard lesson from term limits elsewhere, and I have to face it.

Two answers. First, the accountability we would supposedly weaken is already badly attenuated here. A list MP does not personally face the voters; she faces a party whose aggregate vote decides how many names on its list survive. The final-term problem is real in constituency systems. In ours, the voter’s grip on the individual was surrendered at the design stage – we would be trading away a discipline we barely have.

Second, the eleventh-year problem is precisely what clauses two and three are for. The cooling-off period and the forfeitable payout are not decoration; they exist to make the future employer an unprofitable thing to cultivate.

It is the migration of power to unelected insiders, though, I concede in full – which is why this reform cannot travel alone. It must arrive with the rebuilding of a professional civil service, so that continuity lives in institutions rather than in personalities: in offices that can be audited, not careers that must be protected.

The second objection is South African, and I take it just as seriously: in a country where capital still sits mainly in white hands, elected office has been one of the few ladders open to talented black people without inherited wealth – and a tour of duty is easy to preach when, like the American founders, you have a farm to go home to.

Two replies and a concession. First, ask who the career system actually protects: the dry taps are in black wards, and State Capture showed that you need not buy politicians one by one – capture the point that controls the careers, and the careers come wholesale.

A politician who owns her exit is harder to purchase than one who fears it. That is what the third clause is for, and it is why the tour of duty must be properly paid, during and after, so that a person with nothing can afford to serve honestly. But the concession stands: if elected office rotates while boardrooms do not, permanent power gains.

The answer to permanent capital is not permanent politicians who have spent 30 years failing to check it. It is a professional state whose careers are open to black talent and closed to party lists.

The familiar objections are easier. Institutional memory belongs in the civil service and the Chapter 9 institutions, not in individuals – we lean on long-servers because we hollowed out the professional state to make room for them. Good people lost? Yes; I would take that trade on any day the audit reports are published. Small parties? Phase the rule in over two cycles. A transition problem is not a design problem.

### Fatal-sounding objection

The fatal-sounding objection remains: termination clauses must be passed by the very employees they would retire. Turkeys, Christmas. If the argument ends there, this column is a wish.

It does not end there, for one reason: since 2024, no party can pass anything alone. Coalition politics has turned every small party into a toll gate. Let me not romanticise them – small parties grow career politicians too, and a founder-led party can be the purest employment scheme in the whole system.

The case does not rest on their virtue. It rests on arithmetic: reforms pass in the narrow window when the people with the most to lose need the votes of the people with the least to lose. Small-party members were never going to get 30 years on a list; a rotation rule costs them little and costs the incumbent class everything.

Term limits and cooling-off rules are exactly the price a smaller partner can extract for its votes. And if the parties will not sell, there is precedent for taking the decision out of their hands: the last expansion of who may stand for office was not volunteered by the parties – it was [ordered by the Constitutional Court in 2020](https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2023/42.html), and Parliament legislated it three years later, after [twice asking the court for more time](https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2023/41.html).

The window in which the insiders need outsiders is the only window in which insiders vote against themselves. That window is open now. It will not stay open.

### What I am not arguing

This is not an argument about big government or small government. It is an argument about design. Democracy made politics a profession, and then acted surprised when politicians behaved like employees trying to keep their jobs.

We keep trying to fix the employees: new leaders, new parties, new coalitions. The cheaper fix is to abolish the job. Make public office something a person does, not something a person is – a season of service with a clean exit, not a lifetime with an open till.

Gogo would put it more simply, and more kindly than I have. In her house, a guest was never a problem; after enough days a guest simply stopped being one – handed a hoe and showed the fields, because by then you belonged to the household, and the household works. Only *isidalwa seNkosi* – the Lord’s own creature, one He made unable to work – was carried without complaint, for life.

The house is this country; the fields are the ordinary work the rest of us do. Our politicians have eaten long enough, and the Lord made them able. Hand them the hoe, and show them the fields. **DM**