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Zuma’s bureaucratic empire

Two of the main reasons for Thabo Mbeki’s downfall were that he was too bureaucratic, and too fond of concentrating power in his own hands. So the ANC got rid of Thabo and his old pipe. In came Jacob Zuma, a non-smoker and non-drinker, and many thought a new day had dawned. But now, oddly enough, and well into the second term of his presidency, Zuma presides over an even bigger empire of red tape – and the presidency has a much tighter stranglehold on effective governance.

After taking over as the president of the Republic of South Africa following the 2009 general elections, Jacob Zuma increased the size of the executive branch of government from 28 departments to 35,1 with the National Planning Commission (NPC) being one of the most prominent additions to the public service. In his second term, which started in 2014, Zuma increased the number of departments to 37.2 As a developing nation frustrated by poor delivery of public services, South Africans seem to tolerate any expansion of the public service, as long as it is presented as a fix for poor performance. For this reason, the formation of the NPC was welcomed without any critical evaluation.

The approach is quite simple. Identify a problem in the public service and then create a department to deal with it specifically. This is a self-justifying initiative showing that government does care about resolving backlogs. What this approach lacks, however, is the realisation that the problems did not arise because certain institutions had not yet been invented to deal with them. No, the problems appeared because the existing institutions could not solve them. And that is why the creation of more institutions only adds to the number of non-performing institutions. The best alternative is to adjust existing departments to deal with the newly identified problems. This type of response to problems is not unique to South Africa. Big bureaucracies, often dysfunctional, exist all over the world, even in advanced democracies such as the United Kingdom.3 It is a common practice for politicians, together with their civil service counterparts, to grow government to an unrecognisable behemoth capable of delivering nothing.

In an episode of my favourite TV series, Yes Minister, Jim Hacker, the Minister of Administrative Affairs in the British government, is confronted with the problem of big bureaucracy. Hacker’s job is to ensure that government departments deliver on their mandate, and so he wants to cut government departments down to a more manageable size. Mr Hacker’s permanent secretary (in our system the director-general), Humphrey Appleby, is only interested in ensuring that Hacker’s department grows bigger and bigger. Why? Because then the department can have the biggest budget! That is all that matters to civil servants and their political masters: big departments with bigger budgets to play around with.

President Jacob Zuma’s reordering of the public service confirms this approach. New departments and agencies were created to deal with identified failings, particularly poor planning in government. But there has been no attempt to identify those who were not doing their jobs in the government agencies that were there already. This approach simply gives the impression of being busy. Agencies focused on specific problems are mistaken for bodies with the ability to actually tackle those problems and resolve them.

By the end of Zuma’s first term, in 2014, none of his newly created ministries and agencies – including his presidential hot­line – had made any significant improvement in the public service. And this is despite the millions that have been spent on salaries and the operational costs of those newly created bodies.4 In a sense, what Zuma has done is to create a ‘big government’ system that has not received any meaningful critical overview. That’s because in South Africa, the existence of a problem-oriented government agency is accepted as an indication of focus and ability to resolve a problem. There is no discussion about big government.

Zuma appears more of a bureaucrat than Mbeki ever was. The establishment of the NPC, the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation and their clumsily articulated mandates seem to show that Zuma is also an Mbeki-­style centralist! However, the departments he has established have yet to demonstrate their reasons for existence. A prime example is the Department of Economic Development, headed by Ebrahim Patel; it is not clear why this department was created.

But there’s something even more crucial. An ever-growing government bureaucracy weighs on itself to such an extent that there is no clear chain of command. It’s just not clear who’s responsible for what. And Zuma the centralist located the NPC in the Office of the Presidency. I hold strong views on the commission – and how its operation impacts on bureaucratic efficiency in South Africa.

Despite being a democracy, the South African government occasionally shows a fascination for institutions that belong in dictatorial regimes. One such institution is the NPC, which was set up to ‘develop a long-term development vision for government’. The main advantage touted for the commission was that it would provide much-needed long-term plans for South Africa. After all, it was often held that a lack of long-term planning had led to the electricity crisis, and to service delivery protests.

The NPC, it is stated, draws inputs from the wider public. Its notable character is that it promises to offer an opportunity to the public outside government to play a role and make suggestions to government planners. This is a noble call in the spirit of open democracy. But there is one thing we can’t ignore: the commission was created out of frustration with a system in which government plans slowly trickle down through government departments. Policies and plans move from the ruling party manifesto down to Cabinet and then further down to ministries or government departments. This is consultative in the sense that plans pass through a process of filtering, refinement and adaptation. The plans pass through different departments as implementable yearly government programmes. By imposing the NPC as a body chaired and coordinated in the Presidency, the flow of responsibility and ultimately the line of accountability are watered down by the time a plan reaches the department that has to make it work.

The commission claims to have reached out to the people. It is tempting to argue that since it is open to the general public, it strikes a blow for democracy. But this depends heavily on whether the commission actually reflects the views of the public in the long-­term plans it dreams up. Since the commission is chaired and coordinated in the Presidency, the final word on any plan may inevitably be that of the Presidency – and not of the people.

The idea that the commissioners represent society as a whole seems to be taken as an indication that planning is automatically democratic. This idea is misleading. Commissioners may merely provide a legitimising role and may sit on the commission only as symbols of the broader society. There is no proof that they take part in drawing up plans. The much-vaunted public approach of the commission is beginning to look like a way to legitimise choices made by the Presidency – and to disguise them as what the general public suggested. This type of outcome is actually a lot worse than the previous trickle-down process.

What I say here may seem obvious – that the idea of the NPC was flawed from the beginning. But the creation of the commission drew no criticism from well-­informed observers and pundits. In most cases, when government announces an initiative, the pundits wait for it to be implemented before they give their views. While it may seem a logical and circumspect approach to wait before we pronounce on whether or not an initiative is sound, some projects need to be interrogated even before they are implemented.

But the establishment of the NPC was welcomed, with some lukewarm qualifications to the effect that success would depend on the calibre and character of the commissioners. The idea that they would be drawn from the general public, and would include independent academics and business people, seems to have convinced many commentators that the commission would be open and consultative. But no one raised the objection that superimposing a planning commission on top of existing government departments was never going to work. In my view, the commission is merely another boondoggle to create the impression that the president is doing something.

We don’t need the commission because we already have the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF), which relies on input from ministers, provincial premiers and directors-general. There is something fundamentally democratic and participatory about the manner in which each and every government department provides a realistic view of the challenges that confront it. A plan so derived cannot be said to be imposed from above. Challenges identified by individual departments and provincial governments are consolidated into a single strategic framework.

The horizontal positioning of government departments and agencies allows for an equitable contribution into government programmes. Even if we consider the reality that some departments, such as National Treasury, have more influence than others, the fact that all departments are represented means that it is a bottom-­up process. This allows for a swift implementation of plans across government departments and agencies. The system allows for departments to group themselves to pursue outcomes. For example, the departments of Police, Justice and Correctional Serv­ices, Defence and Military Veterans, State Security, and Home Affairs work in a cluster called JCPS (Justice, Crime Prevention and Security) to improve safety and security as an outcome. But the so-called cluster system in South Africa is not pursued rigorously. National departments are not effectively held accountable on the basis of cluster outcomes. Instead, they account only on their specific departmental outputs. In a more rigorous application of a cluster system, government departments would account collectively by showing how their operations directly contribute to cluster outcomes. Using the JCPS cluster as an example, these departments would then collectively be held accountable on how exactly they have contributed to safety and security as a goal within the cluster. To fulfil this level of accountability, a mere statement by the department that their operations generally contribute to, say, safety and security would not suffice.

This system does not mean that departments deviate from the pursuit of their specific mandates. Instead, they account for individual mandates on one level, and on another level they must demonstrate how their individual operations contribute to broader government goals in the MTSF. This means departments and agencies could be tied to government goals instead of working in isolation. The cluster system could be tightened for a more rigorous pursuit of government targets.

The basic flaw in the NPC is that it sits on top of government departments and imposes a top-down power on government planning. National departments and agencies find it difficult to implement plans that are derived in this way. Apart from this awkward system, there is a lingering question: why should a full-fledged democracy adopt central planning? Central planning is essentially based on a siege mentality, and works better in non-democratic countries – usually in a war-economy situation. I suspect the existence of the commission frustrates national departments, which follow a wait-and-see scenario and no longer see fit to engage in bottom-up planning, but instead use the commission’s top-down plans.

The adoption of the commission is an indication that Jacob Zuma is a bureaucrat whose manner of organising state administrative machinery is no different from that of Thabo Mbeki. In fact, Zuma seems to have accelerated the centralist process. For some, the growth of bureaucracy under Zuma is an indication of commitment to deliver services, and a boost for his image as a president who listens and responds to the people.

As part of Zuma’s consolidation of bureaucracy, the Department of Minerals and Energy was split in two. The same thing happened with Education, as tertiary institutions were hived off into a Department of Higher Education and Training. And I must add the creation of the Ministry of Women, Children and People with Disabilities – run from the Presidency. In a sense, this type of reorganisation amounts to the proverbial shifting of chairs on the deck of the sinking ship.

But at least the president was seen to be doing something, and that in itself was an indication of commitment towards action, and ability to spur government into doing something. President Zuma’s quest for a more visible government was also seen in the much-hyped creation of the presidential hotline, established in 2009. It was inaugurated under the directorship of a kwaito star, Eugene Mthethwa, and was meant to address the poor response of government departments, whose phones seemed to be permanently on voicemail.5 The Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation department within the Presidency would also keep and evaluate a central depository of information about government progress.

But each and every government department already has monitoring and evaluation responsibilities. Individual departments may not have carried out these responsibilities due to lack of skills, capacity or the right attitude. It may be the case that for every departmental oversight agency, there is an equivalent institution in the Presidency. With time, these parallel institutions may create confusion and undermine the development of government departments.

The Mbeki administration came under attack for its heavy bureaucracy, which was misdiagnosed and blamed on Mbeki’s personal fascination with power. And now the Zuma administration is genuinely frustrated by the bureaucracy’s inability to deliver on the party mandate, and also by its poor response to popular demands. But the two presidents are not that far apart in terms of how they organised the state bureaucracy. In fact, Zuma has in many ways intensified Mbeki’s bureaucracy. Under Zuma, we have seen increased incorporation of institutions in the Presidency – the very problem that led to Mbeki’s administration being characterised as too distant and disconnected from the ANC.

Zuma has failed to resolve the problem that partially carried him to power. He has failed to radically reverse the growth in the number of public servants. The growth in the public sector wage bill in effect ‘crowds out all else’,6 reducing or undermining the government’s ability to deliver even the bare minimum of services. The growth of the public sector is becoming a major concern. Once the state has entered into a phase of bureaucratisation, any leader who attempts to radically reverse it may be undermined by the global community. By this I mean finance and business, whose economic policy preferences are usually smoothly implemented under a rigid government bureaucracy. So, Zuma would appear delinquent if he tried to reverse or even halt the further growth of bureaucracy.

Zuma has admitted that a democratic system is difficult to work through, and he would prefer ‘dictatorship’. While campaigning ahead of the 2016 local government elections, he openly stated that:

If you just give me six months to be a dictator, things will be straight … At the moment to take a decision, you need a resolution or petition. If it was up to me, education would be more than compulsory … if you are found walking in the streets, police would stop you and ask what is it that you’re getting in the streets and not at school. If it was up to me, we would put stronger measures to ensure that in 30 years’ time no one would be uneducated.7

This is not the first time that Zuma was unable to conceal his admiration for the type of decision-making process possible only under a dictatorship. In March 2015, he opened up about what he would do, if only he could be a dictator:

If I was a dictator, I would change a few things … For an example I would say to a family, you need a house, here is the material and only bring the government person to supervise. Build your house. That is what I would say. And if they say they can’t build, we will just get the person who can build; they must participate. If they can’t put a brick they must mix the mud. So that there is a feeling that ‘this is my own’.8

Zuma’s impatience with democracy and the process of wider participation in decision-making could be inspired by the time he spends with his Chinese counterparts. Indeed democracy can be irritating, because it requires lengthy processes in terms of decision-making. But democracy also ensures that leaders account to the people. If it wasn’t for democracy, Zuma might be able to deliver the goodies to this great nation of South Africa, but he might also help himself to state resources even more than he did with his Nkandla residence. While a first-year Politics student might argue that a dictatorship is a much better system than a democracy, it is unacceptable for the sitting president of a hard-won democracy to express such sentiments openly. This raises questions about what else the president would want to achieve with a short spell as a dictator. Given the grim legacy of apartheid, it is embarrassing for a South African president to yearn for dictatorship as a way of solving the country’s problems.

The manner in which Zuma has arranged state bureaucracy, however, shows that he might be enjoying a bit of dictatorship in the manner in which his departments function and relate to each other. One need not be a dictator to undermine the democratic functioning of institutions. Even those who sit at the helm of democratic institutions can resort to desperate measures, measures that show their distaste for democracy as a way of addressing challenges in society. After all, US president Richard Nixon led a democratic state – and had taken an oath to serve and protect American democracy – but he abused democratic institutions to cover up the Watergate scandal, a massive abuse of power by a democratically elected leader.9