The unglamorous reform that could change how government works in South Africa

A conversation with Ivor Chipkin on public service reform, evidence, and the role of think tanks

Enrique Mendizabal: Let’s begin with history. South Africa’s public service has been caught between political control and managerial responsibility since 1994. What was the problem the new Act is trying to solve?

Ivor Chipkin: South Africa had this extraordinary democratic breakthrough in 1994. It was the first democratic election. The African National Congress came to power in an extraordinary historical moment, not only for South Africa but for the world. It felt like the closing of the colonial epoch. Apartheid South Africa was the last colonial regime on the African continent.

There was enormous excitement about building democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. But the ANC came to power with a real dilemma, and we should not underestimate it.

It had very ambitious progressive plans to transform apartheid South Africa: the Reconstruction and Development Programme, meeting basic needs, and using the state to achieve greater equality in the economy and society. But one of the agreements in the negotiated political settlement was that existing public servants would keep their jobs.

That meant, largely, apartheid-era public servants. Not only from the white apartheid administration, but also from the civil services of the Bantustans — the nominally independent and autonomous regions created under apartheid. Each had its own administration.

So the ANC had to realise its ambitious progressive policies using the administrations of the apartheid period. The leadership was horrified by that prospect. There was concern that these administrations would not only fail to implement the new government’s policies but might actively subvert them.

The workaround came in the form of the Public Service Act of 1994. The ANC made sure that new appointments to the public service would happen through a politically controlled process. The president, cabinet ministers, and provincial ministers had discretion over appointments, human resources decisions, promotions, terms of service, and even operational decisions within departments.

So, if you were a senior official, you had no real power unless those powers were delegated to you by the politician. Historically, this was meant to solve a real problem. But it very quickly began to create serious difficulties inside departments, especially in the relationship between politicians and senior officials.

Enrique: So the old public servants stayed, but new people entering the system were appointed through a politically controlled process?

Ivor: Exactly. The old public servants did not leave immediately. They were phased out over the next 30 years. In that sense, there has been a successful process of demographic transformation. The South African public service today is largely transformed.

But in the first decade, many apartheid-era public servants were still there. And, in some cases, they worked very successfully with the new dispensation.

There were major achievements in the 1990s. The creation of the National Treasury, for example, and the South African Revenue Service. These were extraordinary institutional achievements. They were made possible by blending new politically aligned public servants with old apartheid-era public servants who were committed to working with the new government.

So the picture is complicated. You had new politically aligned public servants and a large body of apartheid-era officials in the same departments. In some places, that worked. In others, it did not.

Enrique: What happened in the places where it did not work?

Ivor: The intervening 30 years are important.

In the early 1990s, the model of political control did produce some successes. It allowed the ANC to bring talented people into the public service and to build institutions.

But from around the 2000s, it very clearly started to go wrong. South Africa went through what we call state capture: a period of large-scale corruption and looting of public administrations. That was made possible, in part, because politicians with nefarious intentions were able to bring their own people into administrations.

Politicians were no longer just bringing politically aligned public servants into departments. They were bringing in people whose intentions were not exactly noble.

At the same time, huge divisions emerged inside the ANC itself. A kind of internal civil war broke out within the party, and that conflict played out inside the administration as politicians brought their allies into the civil service.

The result was chaos: political and administrative. Over the last 20 years, we have seen a general decline in the performance of the South African state. There has been corruption and looting, but also a decline in the technical ability of public administrations to do their jobs.

We have long argued that one of the key drivers of this failure is the politicisation of the administration.

Enrique: You have described the Public Service Amendment Act as one of the most significant reforms to South Africa’s system of government since 1994. What has actually changed?

Ivor: The breakthrough came around 2022. A new generation of public servants and public administration scholars became more influential in government. There were senior public servants, especially in the Department of Public Service and Administration, who were sick and tired of being blamed for all government failures, as corrupt, stupid or lacking skills.

That opened a space for reform. A whole range of reform ideas emerged and were consolidated in the professionalisation framework: the idea that South Africa could no longer continue with a public service appointed largely on political criteria, and had to move towards appointment on the basis of merit.

That is where we at the New South Institute began building alliances and relationships with senior public servants and Parliament.

What the reform essentially does is take administrative powers away from politicians and give them to administrators. If you are a director-general or head of department, you will have the authority you need to do your job: to appoint officials, make day-to-day decisions, structure your department and staff it properly.

Enrique: This sounds very South African, but also very familiar in comparative terms.

Ivor: It is very similar to the major reforms in the United States in the late nineteenth century, such as the Pendleton Act. It is also similar to civil service reforms in France and across Europe after the Second World War.

The central issue is the same: demarcating the difference between political office and administrative office.

In that sense, South Africa is moving in a direction that Europe, the United States and parts of Latin America moved in earlier. Brazil, Uruguay and other countries have histories of this kind of reform.

Post-colonial Africa often did not go in this direction, for interesting reasons. But there are now moves in this direction in parts of the continent: Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, and even Nigeria is experimenting with some of these questions.

So I think this is the general route of travel for many states, and I think it is the correct route of travel.

Enrique: You mentioned the National Treasury and SARS as success stories. In many countries, there are “islands of excellence” or “pockets of efficiency” inside the state — usually treasuries, central banks or revenue authorities — while other sectors struggle. Did something similar happen in South Africa?

Ivor: Very much so. South Africa has extraordinary unevenness.

Take the police. South Africa had very high levels of murder during the transition. During the 1990s, as the transition progressed, murder rates and crime rates came down.

There was a restructuring of the police and a move to bring policing under civilian control. Those reforms were successful in important ways. For the first time in South African history, a black working-class family in a township could call the police to deal with a private emergency. That was unprecedented. The police had never been a resource that black South Africans could draw on in that way.

But in the 2000s, the police became politicised, and the results have been catastrophic. South Africa is now in the midst of major parliamentary and judicial inquiries into the police because policing is in deep crisis.

Across the board, there has been a weakening of state institutions. But there are also islands of excellence. The National Treasury and SARS took a real hammering during state capture, but they survived. SARS has regained much of the professionalism it lost and is making strides in tax collection again.

Enrique: What explains those islands of excellence? Why do some institutions survive when others decline?

Ivor: A lot of the state-building in the 1990s was successful. Ironically, it was made possible through the politicisation of administrations. The new politicians appointed highly effective and capable civil servants to those departments.

So politicisation facilitated professionalisation in some places.

That was not always the case. Where politicisation facilitated professionalisation, institutions survived. Where it did not, they struggled. And where we have had dramatic failures is in state-owned enterprises, which are major economic actors in South Africa: electricity, water, logistics and so on.

The economy has taken a huge knock from the politicisation of those institutions.

This is why we need to be careful about drawing hard normative lines between patrimonial and professional systems. In South Africa’s early years, the politicised system sometimes enabled professionalisation. So we should avoid saying one system is always good and the other always bad. History is more complicated than that.

Enrique: That distinction between politics and policy is important. In English, we can distinguish between “politics” and “policy”, but in Spanish and French, the same word often covers both. The reform seems to clarify the boundary without building an impermeable wall between political leadership and administration.

Ivor: I think the distinction is worth making.

Ideally, politicians make policy. In a democratic system, we elect politicians and parties based on their policy platforms.

But, unfortunately, in many situations, that is not what political parties and politicians are doing. They are not necessarily holders of the general interest. They may be pursuing private interests or very narrow partisan interests.

So the idea that politicians are always trustees of the public interest is often inappropriate.

This is where think tanks become important. In some environments, think tanks and thinktankers can become carriers of an idea of the public interest. We do not bear private or personal interests in the same way. Our institutions are often funded through philanthropic foundations or other means. We can hold on to some idea of the public, especially when political parties or politicians pursue private or partisan interests.

I think that is what happened in South Africa.

Enrique: So what role did think tanks play in this reform?

Ivor: The easy answer would be to say: we played a huge role; this is all our work. But I think the more important point is about the intellectual and political space that think tanks can create.

Think tanks develop ideas, generate ideas and put them in the public domain. They can be faithful to some idea of the public interest.

I know that has become controversial in a postmodern age. But political documents like constitutions do represent some vision of the general interest. That vision is often obscured by internal party-political wrangling.

Think tanks can hold onto that broader vision. They can mobilise, advocate and lobby on its behalf.

Of course, there is a technical role. Think tanks can work on implementation, legislation and the details of policy design. But if we reduce think tank work only to that technical space, we miss a huge opportunity.

Because we are independent, and because we can be understood as bearers of the public interest to some extent, we should play a bigger role in proposing and driving policy development — especially when that policy is bold, controversial or unpopular within a particular political party.

That is the opportunity think tanks have.

Enrique: But this kind of work requires patient support. You did not know, at the start, when the reform would happen or whether it would happen at all. You had to keep creating spaces, publishing, convening, lobbying and building relationships.

Ivor: Exactly.

You and I have both been in many conversations where funders ask, “What is the impact?” What does all this add up to? You are writing papers, organising meetings, publishing op-eds — but what does it add up to?”

And, often, the honest answer is: I am not sure yet.

We are trying to create space for ideas. We are trying to plant ideas in the public domain. We are trying to build support for them. To use an old word, we are trying to build a kind of hegemony around a framework so that these ideas become normal.

That is incremental, hard work. It does not suddenly pay off.

What one needs are funders who understand the incremental, accidental and contingent nature of this work. Funders who have enough faith that what you are doing is worthwhile, and enough faith in the people doing it.

Because spaces open unexpectedly. And when they do, you need to be ready to enter them.

That is what happened here. We had been pushing on these doors for a long time. Then suddenly they opened. We had the resources and the preparation to enter those spaces.

The opening came in 2022. Then, in 2024, South Africa went through a major political shift. The ANC lost its parliamentary majority. It remains the largest party, but it is no longer the majority party. South Africa moved into an era of coalition politics.

That has fundamentally changed the mood in Parliament. Suddenly, there is more openness to alternative ideas. Some parliamentary committees are working better than they did historically. That created another opportunity to advance ideas that had struggled before.

So think tanks need to be in those spaces. But to be there, they need rare funders who not only fund limited projects, but who are there for the long haul.

Enrique: Why is that so difficult for international funders to understand – and get behind?

Ivor: In my experience, international philanthropic foundations often operate on three-year cycles. There is leadership churn. Strategies change. You may be in favour during one funding cycle and out of favour in another.

Those interruptions matter. They can mean that when an opportunity opens, you do not have the resources to act. The interruption in funding does not necessarily coincide with changes in the political environment. That is just the way it is.

In South Africa, we are lucky that we still have one or two funders prepared to invest over the long term. When opportunities arise, they can scale up their support. There are not many, but they exist.

That may be one reason South Africa is unusual on the African continent. I am not sure the same philanthropic infrastructure exists elsewhere.

Enrique: The Act has been passed, but the story is not over. What comes next?

Ivor: Implementation.

That is now the key area. We are trying to build the resources and teams required to assist in implementation, and to monitor what happens going forward.

The opportunities to game the law are enormous. You can have compliance on paper while undermining the reform in practice.

So we want to develop an implementation framework that anticipates how politicians and senior public servants might game the system. We need regulations that can prevent that. There is also training work to be done, as well as monitoring and evaluation work.

This is the challenge of being in the think tank space: you are constantly trying to find people who believe in the work and will support it.

That is why these conversations matter. Other think tanks, in other parts of the world, need to recognise that these are important developments. In South Africa, there is some interest in public administration, but not much. If we can draw more attention to these reforms as major events — not only for South Africa but for Africa and the global South — we have a better chance of attracting people who might support the work.

These reforms can also inspire and inform developments elsewhere.

Enrique: This is central to evidence-informed policy. Many funders are interested in impact around specific projects in education, health, policing or housing. But if the administrative framework cannot absorb or use evidence, then those projects may not go far.

Ivor: Exactly.

Public administration is the framework within which all these sectoral interventions operate. Discrete interventions in health, education, or policing that do not account for the administrative structure often have only short-term effects. Eventually, they are overwhelmed by the inertia of the broader system.

Or they do not go anywhere at all because they have not engaged with the administrative processes that determine whether policy can be implemented.

Administration is hard work. It is a hard slog. It is terribly unglamorous. But it is absolutely fundamental.

When you get breakthroughs in this area, they can be huge. If you look comparatively, whether in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, South Korea, China, or elsewhere, administrative reforms are often the most transformational.

Enrique: That is a good place to end. These reforms may not sound glamorous, but they could shape South Africa’s economy, public services and democratic institutions across the board — not only in one sector.

Ivor: That is exactly right.