Chickens Come Home to Roost

The Mystery of Competence

Why exactly has the African National Congress been so bad at the management of its government in many basic areas of service provision, particularly since 2009, which led to its major electoral shortfall this month?

I have here in mind the following in particular: the generation and distribution of electrical power; the maintenance of public order particularly in densely-populated urban downtowns and townships; the building of housing and new infrastructure; the handling of tenders and contracts; the provision of safety inspection, fire suppression and emergency response, and so on. Why in this sense has South Africa since 2009 reproduced earlier but similar failures in basic management of the state in much of postcolonial Africa? There are a number of possible answers, some obviously wrong and others more valid.

1. It was not a question of capacity. That explanation works for many African nation-states, that they inherited weak and grossly underfunded administrative institutions with almost no revenue base and a material infrastructure built mostly for extractive purposes. The South African state in 1993 was expansive. It had well-established revenue collection capacities and it was not a conventionally neoliberal state in the sense that it retained state authority over many things that the US and UK had privatized under Reagan and Thatcher, including energy generation and distribution. It had exceptionally strong authority over spatial allocation and management, though that capacity was tied to racial segregation and that had been precisely what the UDF set out to attack in the 1980s.

2. Or, perhaps, it was a question of capacity in the sense of what Mahmood Mamdani called “bifurcation”. E.g., there was the South Africa that was strongly provisioned and strongly governed (white South Africa) and the South Africa where the state was largely present only in terms of its security apparatus and as a minimal provisioner of services. Certainly everybody agrees that the 1993 state inherited an enormous challenge in terms of extending its capacity into townships and rural areas that was both material and administrative. E.g., you had to build housing where the state previously had been mostly concerned to keep housing from being built, you had to provide power infrastructure to existing and new residential infrastructure and to maintain level of supply to the formal economy, and so on. If you buy into the idea that decolonization simply internationalized core-periphery relationships in a new way (e.g., the empires maintained managerial power over their colonies but relieved themselves of being physically present and vulnerable through an administrative responsibility) you could look at South Africa and say, “Here’s the only example where the empire couldn’t just pack up and fuck off in that way: it’s still right there next to the colony it underdeveloped”. You could suggest that this proximity in a sense broke both the postcolony AND the nation, partly because of a lack of capacity but also partly because of a failure to unravel that bifurcation.

3. I have all sorts of issues with Mamdani’s line of thought, however, so I won’t stop there. Another basic issue, I think, is that the ANC’s post-1993 leadership returned out of exile with conventionally formal and technocratic expectations about how to run a government that were poorly matched to the microsociology of the actual ministries and portfolios that they inherited. They knew what the goals were in relationship to nationwide challenges, but they didn’t actually know the lived, real administrative hierarchy they had at their command. Whatever training or expertise they’d developed abroad, whether in the West or in the Eastern Bloc, left them complicatedly unready for the specifics of management in South Africa, especially just below the level of the initial Cabinet, which was more an exercise in power-sharing with the National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party. This in turn I think made the state apparatus vulnerable to Zuma and his supporters—by the time the ANC’s leadership had a more expert grasp of the particular administrative cultures of key portfolios, the Mbeki wing lost its grip at the Polokwane conference.

4. Which is the next piece of the puzzle. Here the state’s capacity was precisely its weakness. The severity of racial hierarchy in colonial Africa generally, as well as apartheid South Africa, made the public sector the easiest route to creating what looked like an ordinary liberal elite. Integrating professions and desegregating the formal economy would take time even if that was approached as an urgent priority, but turning over the civil service seemed readily possible in the short-term. In much of postcolonial Africa, since state capacity was so anemic, that could be reconciled also with scaling up to the necessities of real national governance. Whereas the post-1993 South African state was a big fat target already full of civil servants who did relatively little and got paid a lot, because that’s how the apartheid state subsidized white life well beyond what the formal economy could provide. You didn’t have to make the state even bigger in order to create an overnight middle-class, you just had to shuffle out a certain number of Afrikaners via retirement or emigration. And as you did, you had a form of state capture already underway well before 2009 and a constituency that would avidly look to expand state capture even further and support leaders who provided those opportunities. Which in turn meant that managerial competency in key areas was not at all valued or selected for, and that the government’s more ambitious goals had to funnel through administrative bottlenecks where there were people positioned from an early moment to divert funds to themselves and to help create networks of support for tenderpreneurs and so on.

5. Speaking of money, I also think that white-owned property holders and businesses showed a lot of flexibility and skill in prophylactically making a bit of room for a Black elite while at the same time mobilizing existing regulatory structures to maintain and defend their position in the formal economy, which in turn circumscribed what even highly competent government actors and civic groups could hope to accomplish in terms of reform, narrowing the field of what was possible and plausible in those terms. (Ben Bradlow’s upcoming book Urban Power looks to add a lot of important nuance to any argument along these lines.)

6. In 2004, I argued that shame is an important tacit part of a politics that seeks to mobilize around or on behalf of moral principles, and that when a political elite stops feeling shame, any hope of mobilizing moral rhetoric to guide and constrain government authority dissipates. “Shame” in this reading was really just a placeholder for a sort of Weberian-liberal sense of bureaucratic and governmental power, a notion that the holders of state power ought to embrace a sense of its proper limits and responsibilities. I was thinking at the time about the difference between the early Zimbabwean state, where a ZANU-PF minister who was exposed for corruption still felt enough shame to commit suicide, and the later ZANU-PF government, where no such shame existed. But I was also reading this against Thabo Mbeki’s bog-standard understanding of African nationalism, so continuous with similar understandings across the continent all the way back to the 1960s, that rejected the idea of civil society and thus in some sense of a government that had limits or accountability to something outside of itself. That ideology in the end is one of the roots of shamelessness. If the party and the nation and the government and the leader and the society are all unified and indistinguishable from one another, then what looks like criticism or antagonism from civil society gets reframed as exogenous, foreign, Western, colonizing. If it were proper, it would be internal, familial, private, communal, and therefore not hearable—or capable of producing shame. In terms of managerial competency, what that meant was that from the early 2000s onward, more and more people in the South African government involved in service provision were provided an ideology of shamelessness, an armor against scrutiny and accountability. Zuma was a dramatic accelerant for that provision, but it was already very much in place.

7. Speaking of Mbeki and Zuma, there’s a small, simple but important thing that involves them both, which is simply that Mbeki was just plain bad at political combat within the party on multiple levels and at the same time, elements of the South African judiciary, most notably Chris Nicholson, were spectacularly stupid about corruption and incompetence generally and Zuma in particular. That combination dramatically enabled the rapid decline of governmental effectiveness.

There’s a lot more here, but I want to insist that a lot of the political and social microhistory matters, as I think it does in all postcolonial states in Africa, even when the outcomes seem structurally rather similar. There are developments here that were highly contingent, which I think in turn offers some limited hope for things to get better. Though it may also be true that it is easier to fail in this respect than it is to repair a failure.

What we might ask at the same time is this: which nation-states in the world offer fairly elevated standards of competency and probity in service provision, and whether that is mostly just a matter of relative wealth? I don’t think it’s that simple, since there are governments that have a lot of resources but are at best inconsistent in service provision. When do the political leaders of a given nation-state pay attention to what they’re being told about services or have reliable data collection, when do leaders align themselves behind technical quality and managerial competence in services, when are there immediate political and professional consequences for screwing up services like fire suppression, garbage pick-up, road maintenance, energy infrastructure, food security, emergency response and so on? When do leaders in democracies—or maybe even some authoritarian states—regard service delivery as a political necessity, as a part of their legitimacy?

Wherever that is, it’s not South Africa since the mid-2000s, in any event. But perhaps this election will send the message that from here on in, doing better will be a requirement for political survival.