The DA’s plan to end cadre deployment
It has been gratifying to see that the new year started with some desperately-needed media spotlight being shone upon the collapse of our public service. The discussion was triggered by the following sentence in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s January newsletter: “We are committed to end the practice of poorly qualified individuals being parachuted into positions of authority through political patronage.”
I spent most of my first year in Parliament working to understand and expose the true scale of the collapse that threatens to turn South Africa into a failed state. From a shocking lack of capacity across the board, to spending far more on public wages than both our developing country peers and the rich countries of the OECD, to the arrogant lack of accountability that saw the government implement less than 10% of the recommendations issued by the Public Service Commission, as well as ongoing attempts to hoodwink the public on the new ministerial handbook – 2019 laid bare that the current system is simply beyond saving.
It is no longer of any use to just tinker around the edges. We need courageous reforms that fundamentally and radically change how the public service functions.
This is precisely what worries me about Ramaphosa’s sentiments in his newsletter. While some media outlets twisted his words by proclaiming that the President wants to “end cadre deployment,” Ramaphosa never actually mentioned cadre deployment in his newsletter. Instead, he merely expressed his dissatisfaction at the “deployment” of “poorly qualified individuals” into the state.
But a lack of qualifications is not the underlying problem. South Africa’s public service has not collapsed only because many senior public servants are totally unqualified for their posts. It has collapsed because every single senior public servant is appointed by a politician. At the heart of cadre deployment is the belief that politicians should have the power to appoint professional public servants. This means that, even if a public servant possesses the proper qualifications, they will still put politics over delivery because they know that their careers depend on pleasing politicians.