South Africa's Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects

2. Governance, political accountability and service delivery

35 2 Governance, political accountability and service delivery There was little that united South Africans at the dawn of their democratic transition, but if there was anything – other than the desire to avert a civil war – it would have been a yearning for political accountability and service delivery. South Africans may have meant different things by these terms, but there was nevertheless a general desire across racial, class and gender divides for a political elite and a state that would be responsive to the needs of its citizens. Yet, by 2013, public opinion across the breadth of the political spectrum concurred that there was both a lack of accountability and a general shortfall in service delivery in South Africa. How did this come to pass? Much of the debate about these issues has focused on institutional design and the quality of the country’s human resources. Thus, since 1994, state officials have regularly redesigned state institutions and the relations between them, with a view to enhancing their effectiveness (Presidential Review Commission, 1998; Swilling et al., 2008). Poorly trained officials have been blamed for the inefficiencies and training and development programmes have thus been introduced (Fraser-Moleketi, 2002). Critics of government have condemned the ruling party’s policies of cadre deployment and affirmative action for leading to the appointment of inappropriately skilled personnel and bloated administrative systems (Democratic Alliance, 2012b; The Economist, 3 June 2010). 36 South Africa’s Suspended Revolution The ruling party’s allies have commented on these issues too – see, for example, the call by Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), for the scrapping of the country’s provinces (Business Day, 21 December 2011; Paton, 2012). But, while institutional design is important, it alone cannot account for the malaise affecting South Africa’s governance and political landscape. After all, societies with similar institutional and governance frameworks have fundamentally different service delivery and accountability outcomes. Federal Germany, for example, is far more accountable and efficient than federal Nigeria. Similarly, unitary Britain is more accountable and efficient than federal Nigeria. Clearly, therefore, it is necessary to look beyond institutional design to understand the variety of governance and political outcomes in different societies. Comparisons can be useful, but they cannot replace an understanding of a particular social context and an investigation of how this affects the performance of institutions, individuals and state officials. Whereas institutional design is a key variable in understanding outcomes, its feasibility and appropriateness should not be generically determined. Rather, the relevance of particular institutions should be contextually determined and grounded; that is, their appropriateness should be assessed in relation to the particular needs and characteristics of the society they serve. An assessment of the South African government’s institutional lethargy must, therefore, look beyond the debate about institutional design to highlight the dilemmas generated by our social context (including the policy and behavioural choices of our political elites and other actors) and consider how these have contributed to the situation the country finds itself in. Before proceeding with this, however, it is useful to briefly outline the institutional architecture and governance structures that have been developed by the political 37 Governance, political accountability and service delivery elites, and in particular the African National Congress (ANC), for the South African state. The construction of the post-apartheid state Contemporary South Africa’s institutional architecture and governance arrangements developed in three distinct phases, which are discussed in more detail in the next three sections of the chapter. The first phase occurred in the negotiations process, which produced the Interim Constitution of 1993. The second phase took place through the deliberations of the constituent assembly, which produced the Constitution of 1996. The third phase comprised the institutional and administrative reforms introduced by Thabo Mbeki at the start of his presidential tenure in 1999. Although Jacob Zuma has since introduced some further reforms in 2009 – establishing new ministries and expanding ministerial appointments from 28 to 34 – these have been mainly administrative in nature and have affected the form of the state rather than substantively changing its inner workings. Thus South Africa under Zuma, despite all the pretensions of his administration, is very much a product of the Mbeki era. Phase one: the negotiations process The negotiations began with the unbanning of the ANC on 2 February 1990 and the release of Nelson Mandela on 11 February 1990. Three bilateral meetings between...