On Wednesday President Jacob Zuma is going to be delivering his first state of the nation address. In a sense this is crunch time for the ruling African National Congress. The ANC was recently returned to power by the electorate on the basis of its promises to make amends for past failures by delivering proper services and creating decent work. The ambitions of the new ANC leadership, and the hopes of its supporters, are now running into the hard reality of economic recession and falling tax revenues.

The party's election manifesto placed much emphasis on a developmental state which would "play a central and strategic role in the economy. We will ensure a more effective government; improve the coordination and planning efforts of the developmental state by means of a planning entity to ensure faster change. A review of the structure of government will be undertaken, to ensure effective service delivery."

The international climate may currently be more conducive to greater state intervention. But, again the hard reality is that locally the state and parastatal sector is in a complete mess. According to Democratic Alliance estimates, "R100-billion of public money" had to be spent on propping up nine failing parastatal institutions between 2004 and 2008. And this was during a period of rapid economic growth. Denel, SAA and the Land bank have consumed billions of taxpayer's money - while Eskom is due to receive a whopping R60bn from state coffers.

The recession is going to hit any residual profitability of parastatal institutions, while the fall off in tax receipts is going to make it much more painful to continue bailing them out. The current financial difficulties the public broadcaster is facing are probably a portent of things to come. According to the Sunday Times the SABC, which is currently unable to pay its bills, will be asking for an R2bn lifeline from government this week.

Moreover, as Ray Hartley recently noted, "The public service which the Zuma government has inherited from the Mbeki years is in tatters. Hospitals and public schools are taking a lot of strain. They do not need more funding. They need better management of their existing budgets."

It is hard to see how the usual ANC remedies of more planning, greater central control and further institutional restructuring are going to cure the state's institutional sickness. The real challenge for the ruling party is to change itself - its own mindset and usual way of doing things - and start placing the proper value on expertise.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that assuming that a person has the aptitude for a particular vocation, it still requires almost a decade of practice before they will be able to master it. He writes, "The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."

Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin as saying, "In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up against and again. Of course, this doesn't address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

Presumably this rule also applies (to one degree or another) to the tasks that judges, engineers, managers, prosecutors, hospital administrators, headmasters and so on, are required to perform. And yet, what is striking about the Mbeki-era, is how little weight was ever given to relevant expertise when it came to making state and parastatal appointments.

In the mid-1990s the ANC obliterated much of the state's institutional capacity by pushing out, and pensioning off, tens of thousands of highly experienced officials. In making replacements expertise barely got a look in - political loyalty and demographic representivity was all that really mattered.

A revealing example of the prevailing ethos was recently provided by a case that came before the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein (see judgment). It concerned the appointment of the principal of Kimberley Junior School in the Northern Cape. The post was advertised by the provincial education department. Five applications meeting the minimum requirements were received. A short list of four was drawn up. The school governing body set up a committee and these candidates were interviewed. The school determined that only one candidate - a Mr P. Theunissen - was suitable to take up the position of principal.

He had, according to the school's motivation to the local department of education, "obtained a score of 98.8, has been a deputy principal for 9 years and acting principal for 6 months. He has excellent experience, sound knowledge of the administration and financial management of a primary school. He has taught for 17 years in a primary school and has insight into current education issues relevant to primary school education. He has had leadership experience in a multi-cultural school."

The second candidate, a Mrs S Rantho, had only obtained a score of 58.1. The school noted, "She is currently HOD at a Secondary School in Bloemfontein and does not have teaching experience in a primary school. Nor does she have adequate administration and management skills to be a principal of a Primary School."

The recommendation of the school was however overridden by the department on purely racial grounds, and Mrs Rantho was appointed. According to the local education head the "need to address the imbalances of the past" trumped the ability of the respective candidates.

It is generally accepted that one of the key determinants of whether state schools succeed or fail is the quality of the principal. By choosing an unsuitable candidate the department was putting the futures of all the pupils of that school in jeopardy. The likely victims happened to be mostly black. The racial composition of the school, according to the SCA, was 60 percent black; 25 percent Coloured; 8 percent Indian and 7 percent white.

If Jacob Zuma is going to start delivering on its election promises (to provide ‘quality education' et al) he is going to have to begin by putting an end to this kind of lunacy.

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