Bee: Helping or Hurting?. Anthea Jeffery
court found that Naidoo had been discriminated against on the grounds of both race and gender, and ordered the SAPS to appoint her to the post with retroactive effect. It also instructed that ‘the absolute barrier’ to the appointment of Indians in the upper echelons of the police should ‘be removed and forthwith’.33 However, so entrenched is the use of rigid racial quotas in the police – and elsewhere in the public service – that this judgment is unlikely to put an end to the practice.
Inappropriate appointments
At the time of the political transition, the South African public service was less efficient than it should have been. Nonetheless, according to Gavin Woods, director of the Anti-Corruption Centre for Education and Research at the University of Stellenbosch, it remained ‘a stable, experienced and … functional sector that achieved most of its operational objectives, including ideologically controversial ones’. However, since 1994 the public service has ‘lost hard management experience and crucial institutional memory’, he says.34
Part of the problem has been the almost 80% turnover in senior management that took place between 1994 and 2007. Also relevant, writes Franks, is a provision in the Employment Equity Act allowing the appointment of black people with no proven capacity but rather the potential to acquire the ability to do the job. Says Franks: ‘This soon became the favoured loophole behind which kin, friends, and comrades were favoured over more competent applicants.’ Moreover, ‘even the possibility of on-the-job mentoring and training diminished as the voluntary severance packages (introduced in May 1996) … depleted the store of experience and expertise within the public service’. As early as 1998, a presidential review commission thus warned of the ‘undesired and serious adverse effects’ that were becoming apparent. These included a decline in staff morale and a decrease in state capacity, both resulting from the loss of skilled personnel.35
By 2007 criticisms of this kind were accelerating. According to former president FW de Klerk, there had been wide consultation and agreement on the need for affirmative action during the negotiating process from 1993 to 1996, but ‘there had never been any talk about imposing demographic representivity’. Nor had it been intended that ‘people without the appropriate qualifications would be appointed to posts merely on racial grounds’.36
Mamphela Ramphele, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and founder of AgangSA, added that the real purpose of affirmative action was ‘regstellende aksie’ (Afrikaans for remedial action). ‘It is intended to give a leg up to those with the potential to succeed who have been hobbled by apartheid. It does not mean putting an unskilled or inexperienced person in a position in which performance is impossible. Such actions that are driven by political-patronage objectives undermine our society’s ability to recruit and retain the best people in both the public and private sectors.’37
In 2008 the Institute for Security Studies warned of ‘a huge leadership gap in parastatals and the public sector’, along with ‘a serious lack of management capacity’, which was crippling the state’s service delivery plans. In similar vein, the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) deplored the high vacancy rate and general inefficiency within the public service, saying the problem was not a lack of money but rather a lack of capacity to implement programmes. The IJR pointed out that budget allocations were made without considering who would carry out the work: ‘For quite a while there’s been a feeling that skilled people will somehow turn up. Yet what we’re witnessing is a high churn and juniorisation of posts, with the result of poor delivery.’38
In 2010 the Public Service Commission, an independent body established by the Constitution to monitor public service performance and promote efficiency, published a report on the ‘Effectiveness of Public Service Leadership’ in national and provincial departments. The report warned that ‘incompetent human resource managers, unskilled employees, nepotism, and hiring people without verifying their qualifications’ were retarding service delivery. ‘Rapid turnover at the top of the state is … destroying institutional memory and accountability,’ it said.39
In 2013 economist Iraj Abedian, chief executive officer of Pan-African Capital Holdings, had harsh words for the lack of skills at senior levels in both government departments and parastatals. Said Abedian: ‘At least 95% of our black executives cannot run the show and the one place where this is concentrated is in our parastatals and among our DGs [directors-general]. They have the title and it seems that employment equity has been achieved, but they don’t know how to do the job – not because they are not intelligent or able to. It’s just that they don’t have the experience.’40
Senior figures within the ANC and government have also begun to acknowledge the extent and salience of the skills shortage in the public sector. Shortly before President Jacob Zuma came to power in 2009, Mathews Phosa, then treasurer-general of the ANC, told FinWeek that ‘a culture of cadre deployment, coupled to affirmative action, had contributed to a significant brain drain in the public service’. These mistakes would have to be corrected via a ‘painful process’ of weeding out public servants who were not qualified for their jobs. In future, affirmative action would have to be ‘politically managed’ so that it no longer drove skilled people out of the public service or undermined the government’s capacity to implement its policies, he said.41
In 2011 the minister of public works, Gwen Mahlangu-Nkabinde, acknowledged that ‘the government was chronically short of capable and honest technocrats’. In 2012 Roy Padayachie, then minister of public service and administration, observed: ‘There’s a great amount of deficiency as far as skills are concerned.’42
Terence Nombembe, South Africa’s auditor-general from 2006 to 2013, has repeatedly bemoaned ‘the lack of skills’ within the public service, which ‘includes an inability to understand basic accountancy’, he says. As a result, only three out of 40 national government departments managed to achieve clean audit outcomes, free of material errors or omissions, in the 2010/11 financial year. No improvement in their audit performance was evident in the following (2011/12) financial year, while the next audit report by Nombembe – issued in March 2013 and covering some 530 state entities at national and provincial levels – showed a steady decline from the 152 clean audits achieved in 2009/10 to 132 in 2010/11 and 117 in 2011/12. Commented Nombembe: ‘Things are serious and … even more serious than we thought … They are serious because the people that are employed by government to do work are least prepared and equipped to do it. The situation is dire.’43
In 2014 a skills audit of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) showed that 60% of senior managers did not meet ‘minimum requirements’ for strategic thinking at an executive level; that 56% lacked ‘adequate competency’ in solving problems and making decisions; and that 35% showed a ‘disregard for financial information’. The skills audit added that, of the 842 job titles sampled, the qualifications of 577 employees were ‘incomplete’ or ‘not authentic’, or had been awarded by fly-by-night tertiary institutions. The audit also found that some 2 360 permanent employees, including 785 senior managers, had no tertiary training. It further questioned whether some 2 250 staff members had even a matric.44
The SABC’s acting chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, responded that the public broadcaster was ‘doing well and had the right management team in place’. But a couple of days later, a report released by the public protector, Thuli Madonsela, found that Motsoeneng himself had falsely claimed to have passed matric and had played a major part in what she described as ‘pathological corporate governance deficiencies’ at the SABC. Commented Business Day in an editorial: ‘The … deficiencies Ms Madonsela found at the broadcaster … are by no means unique to the SABC. They are typical of the symptoms that have presented with increasing frequency at a range of state-owned entities and government departments.’45
Skills shortages within the public service have often left the government with little choice but to rely on external consultants to get much of the work done. As a result, national and provincial departments alone spent R105 billion on consultants in a three-year period from 2008/09 to 2010/11. When this came to light in January 2013, The Times newspaper commented that it was ‘shocking and downright criminal’ that consultants (many of them skilled whites) had to be paid to do the work of already well-paid civil servants. Said the newspaper: ‘It