The politics of the public sector:
Political accountability in post-apartheid South Africa
Paper for a PARI symposium on public sector reform 19 January 2011
Anthony Butler (Wits University)
anthony.butler@wits.ac.za/072 325 8139
Most of the states that moved from authoritarian to purportedly democratic
government in the 1990s have been “haunted by old demons” (Diamond et al
1999, 1). One way to understand the endurance of governance and human rights
pathologies from the authoritarian era is in terms of a failure to introduce
effective mechanisms of political accountability. Without systems to restrain
and guide the exercise of executive power, newly democratic regimes remain
corrupt and unable to guarantee civil liberties (Diamond et al 1999, 2).
African National Congress (ANC) leaders increasingly identify an active state as
the central instrument of social and economic development (ANC 2007a, 2007b,
2009, Butler 2010a). On one widespread view, a “developmental state” is
necessary for both economic prosperity and socio-political “transformation”
(Edigheji 2010, Butler 2010b). A key challenge for the proponents of such state
intervention is that the South African state is currently unable to promote
improved economic performance and social welfare.
The modern state is a system of institutionalised authority that facilitates public
action and makes possible binding collective choices. Without a capable state,
citizens are unable to work together to improve the conditions in which they
live.
In the absence of a reliable and accountable system of public authority, binding
decisions will not bind and ordinary people will find themselves in a state of
conflict.
The modern state, moreover, creates dangers of political subjugation. It implies
a system of authority in which those who obey can be exploited and oppressed
by those who are empowered to command.
A state that is not accountable to citizens can also become a vehicle for the
advance of individual and sectional interests at the expense of wider social
objectives and for the emergence of corruption.
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A central task of modern politics is therefore to build a powerful system of
public authority, capable enough to advance the interests of ordinary citizens,
but limited in the range of its powers and accountable to the people whose name
it claims to rule (Dunn 1999, 329).
The idea of accountability
A range of accountability is mechanisms is required to keep the executive under
control, protect political rights, keep public officials law abiding and
responsive, and deter them from exploiting their offices for private gain.
Schedler (1999, 13) observes that “accountability represents an unexplored
concept whose internal meaning remains evasive”. Schedler’s own (1999, 17)
definition is as follows: “A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B
about A’s (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer
punishment in the case of eventual misconduct.”
This definition forefronts three key aspects of political accountability:
answerability; justification, and enforcement (Schedler 1999, 14-5).
In order to be accountable, public officials are obliged to be answerable in the
sense that they must provide information about their decisions and about how
they were taken.
Accountability also requires justification: this is the demand that ministers and
officials explain – give reasons for – their actions. Accountability therefore
implies the subordination of the policy process to reason and the creation of a
culture of justification among policy makers.
Finally, accountability embraces enforcement. It involves the application of
sanctions, even if only the “soft” ones of exposure and shame, to those found to
have acted improperly.
Two dimensions of accountability
Scholars conventionally divide accountability into vertical and horizontal
dimensions (O’Donnell 1998). Vertical accountability refers to citizens’ efforts
to enforce standards of proper conduct on the state and its officers. The key
mechanisms of vertical accountability in a democracy are exposure (usually
transmitted through the news media) and electoral sanctions.
Horizontal accountability refers to the capacity of state institutions and bodies
themselves to check the abuse of state power. This form of accountability is
sometimes felicitously described as “intrastate accountability” (Mainwaring
2003, 18-19).
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The exercise of horizontal accountability occurs in different sites within the
state. Such accountability inheres in the relationship between executive,
legislature and judiciary when these three branches are able to serve as
monitors of and checks on each other’s actions. Most states possess additional
internal “agents of accountability” (Schedler 1999) such as electoral
commissions, anti-corruption bodies, ombudsmen, human rights commissions,
and audit commissions.
Limits to vertical accountability in South Africa
Electoral accountability is a much weaker mechanism of accountability than is
generally recognised (O’Donnell 1998, 112-3). As Manin, Przeworski & Stokes
(1999, 49) have noted, elections “are inherently a blunt instrument of control”
because “voters only have one decision to make with regard to the entire
package of government policies”. Elections occur only periodically, issues are
poorly defined and understood by electors, and voters find it impossible to
identify and target particular political leaders for alleged misdeeds. For these
reasons, elections are only part of the wider armory needed to render political
elites accountable.
Vertical accountability is also hampered in South Africa by racialised voting
patterns, declining turnout if eligible electors, and the absence of a viable
national opposition. The countervailing power of opposition parties is in some
respects more limited than ever: the Congress of the People (COPE) survives
primarily because it serves the interests of the current ANC leadership. The
Inkatha Freedom Party is close to dissolution. And the Democratic Alliance is
becoming a regional party of the Western Cape.
Local elections typically do not function as mechanisms for holding local
political leaders to account. Communities perceptively recognise that a
community that votes against the ruling party in a province is likely to
encounter greater difficulties accessing state resources and public services that
one that votes strongly for the ruling party.
Civil society groups can monitor the performance of public officials and attempt
to provide systematic oversight of their actions. There has been particular
interest in recent years in “societal accountability” -- the broad variety of nonelectoral strategies that civil society organizations adopt to monitor political
leaders (Goetz and Jenkins 2004). This exercise of soft power is especially
important where parliamentary oversight is limited (Burnell 2008, 13).
Autonomous and variegated media and civil society organizations are essential
if this role is to be adequately performed. There is at best ambivalence within
the ANC about the value of societal accountability and deep intellectual
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confusion about the notion of media and civil society independence from the
state.
Money in politics
The flow of money into politics is forming an increasingly severe barrier to
effective vertical accountability in South Africa. Democratic politics is expensive
because parties need to organise citizens, to educate them, to formulate
alternative public policies, and to campaign energetically for office. But
unregulated funding has repeatedly been implicated in political corruption
because money can be exchanged for policy influence or government contracts.
Money given in return for favours has a corrupting effect on a political system.
It also undermines the trust upon which a flourishing democracy depends.
Parties with disproportionate access to resources can buy votes, monopolise
media coverage, and dispense patronage to supporters (Butler 2010c, 237-8).
Entrenched special access to private and public resources can allow a dominant
party to secure an unhealthy stranglehold over electoral politics.
Within parties, factional war chests can become essential for success in internal
elections. For the first ten decades of democracy, ANC leaders’ concerns centred
on ‘careerism’ – the pursuit of party office for personal gain. Today, however,
money is flowing back into internal party politics where it is used to finance
inter-factional struggles.
Unfortunately conventional party funding reforms are largely ineffective. Rules
on private donations are hard to implement and produce unintended
consequences. Parties or candidates can fail to disclose payments. They can
produce inaccurate accounts, identify loopholes or use financial instruments
that regulators and auditors cannot understand. They can disguise donations as
loans, hide them in commercial transactions, package them to fall under
thresholds, create opaque legal trusts or divert funds to political foundations or
other party-aligned institutions (Butler 2010c, 240-2).
Controls on private donations push money underground so creating instability
within party structures. Bans and caps on party donations result in the
diversion of funds to non-governmental organisations, political foundations, or
party-aligned news media. This encourages spillover legislation as governments
move to clamp down on donations to such institutions too.
Public funding, a widespread response internationally to the challenges of
private funding, limit parties’ reliance on benefactors and so arguable reduces
potential corruption (Taljaard 2010). Unfortunately, state transfers usually add
to the flow of undesirable private money rather than replacing it.
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Internal party contests are more important than public elections in the exercise
of political accountability. Increasingly monetised internal elections within the
ANC determine who wields state power.
In middle-income developing countries like South Africa, hidden public-sector
funding of parties and internal party factions is routine. It is accomplished by
the diversion of revenues from state-owned enterprises, the transfer of public
funds to party-owned companies, the allocation of state jobs and contracts, ‘pay
to play’ conventions that allow only donors access to government work, and the
abuse of state resources for election campaigning.
The power of money is a direct threat to political accountability. Parties and
individual political leaders become accountable their funders rather than to the
people. State institutions designed to check executive power can become
subordinate to the dictates of money-politics, and public policies can
increasingly become marketable commodities.
Weak horizontal accountability in SA
The instruments of intrastate accountability are mostly politically vulnerable in
South Africa today. Parliament, the judiciary, the public protector, and the
various commissions have been subjected to different degrees of political
pressure.
Intrastate accountability cannot be maintained if state bodies lose their mutual
independence or if they become subordinated to central state agencies or ruling
party factions. South Africa’s agencies of accountability have performed
unevenly in recent years as a result of poor administrative capabilities and
politicised appointments.
There are four challenges that make a deepening of horizontal political
accountability especially hard to achieve: presidentialist tendencies; the
turbulent politics of the budget process; the character of the interface between
public and private sectors; and the complex relationships between the state and
the ruling party.
Presidentialism
In South Africa’s modified parliamentary system of government, the government
is drawn from the parliament which creates a “fusion” between the executive
and legislature. The president is elected by the national assembly and appoints a
cabinet that is collectively responsible to parliament. Cabinet governs together
with the president (RSA 1996, 85.2).
A necessary check on executive power in a parliamentary system is that
members of cabinet are accountable to the parliament from which they are
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drawn. The constitution states that, “Members of the Cabinet are accountable
collectively and individually to Parliament for the exercise of their powers and
the performance of their functions” (RSA 1996, 92.2). Moreover, cabinet
ministers must “provide Parliament with full and regular reports concerning
matters under their control” (RSA 1996, 92.6).
Neither mode of cabinet accountability is currently operational. South Africa
has a weak and party-dependent legislature that is unable effectively to oversee
executive action. Collective responsibility has curtailed public debate, and
ministers evade responsibility for mismanagement in their departments. Party
leaders have subordinated the legislature to the executive. Such subordination
can only be averted by a deliberate effort to build parliamentary oversight
capacity. The ANC caucus code of conduct, however, privileges party authority
over that of parliament.
The relationship between president and cabinet has been controversial. The
Constitution envisages a balance between cabinet government, an executive
Presidency and a treasury with wide powers. Cabinet government creates
opportunities for the analytical policy deliberation and allows government
departments to bring sectoral policy communities and interest groups into that
deliberative process.
Under former President Thabo Mbeki, tension emerged between the
constitution’s parliamentary character and the reality of growing centralisation
in the state presidency. Power was pulled from society to state, from provincial
to national level, from the legislature to the executive and from cabinet to
presidency.
Presidential systems can, of course, potentially facilitate political
accountability. The executive and the legislature are separately elected and
confront one another across a terrain defined by a separation of powers. The
legislative branch is obliged to confront and check the executive. Citizens can
hold the president to account when he stands for re-election.
Presidentialism is more often viewed in this region as antithetical to
constitutional stability. Riggs (1988, 1997) has shown that presidential systems
have at some point succumbed to authoritarianism in almost every county in
which they have been introduced. Zero sum elections and irremovable
figureheads with personal mandates to rule are a dangerous combination (Linz
1990).
President Jacob Zuma and his predecessor Thabo Mbeki have tried to secure for
themselves the personal political advantages of parliamentary and presidential
systems while accepting the constraints of neither. They have adopted the
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mannerisms appropriate to a presidential democracy to raise themselves above
the nuisance of parliamentary accountability. At the same time, they have
escaped the direct electoral accountability to the people that a presidential
constitution would demand.
Budgeting and the treasury
The effective management and oversight of public sector finances is a central
aspect of accountability in all states. At all levels of government in South Africa,
scarcity of financial resources has not been the primary determinant of poor
performance. Instead, a lack of appropriate human and managerial resources
has obstructed the effective and economic deployment of available financial
resources (Levin 2007, 19). It has also hampered the creation of systems of
financial accountability.
Performance systems are notoriously complex to build and operate. They
require measures of expenditure impacts (or outcomes), of the outputs required
to bring about those impacts, and of the processes required to realise those
inputs (McGill 2001, 376). Impact assessments and efficiency measures are
exceptionally hard to create and their presence can result in unintended and
perverse consequences.
Such measures cannot easily be used to hold specific officials or agency
managers responsible for securing precise outputs and outcomes. It is difficult
to isolate the causal relationships between inputs, outputs and outcomes. In
complex hierarchical organisations, in which most policies have a transversal
aspect that cuts across departments and tiers, the allocation of responsibility
for outcomes is problematic.
The high turnover of officials in the South Africa public service creates further
obstacles to linking specific outcomes to the performance of officials.
Employment equity policies usually outweigh organisational effectiveness when
managerial performance is assessed (Von Holdt, 2010, 258).
In the absence of other mechanisms for measuring it, the national treasury has
adopted a prominent role in appraising performance and for allocating
resources according to such appraisals.
The relationship between the head of the executive and the finance ministry is
very important in parliamentary systems. One success of post-apartheid
governance has been the institutionalisation of mechanisms for allocating
resources between competing demands. The budgeting system has exhibited
three strengths: public finances have been negotiated within a medium-term
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framework; budgets have been informed by prior decisions about government
priorities; and Treasury representatives have tracked spending proposals from
their initiation in departments and Cabinet cluster committees through to the
full Cabinet.
These three pillars have enhanced predictability and introduced a culture of
justification into conflicts over resources. Opportunities for diversion or waste
of resources have been minimised because Treasury scrutiny has begun at the
policy initiation stage; the finance minister has attended all key ministerial
cluster committee meetings; and departments’ draft Cabinet memorandums
have been considered in the light of Treasury-ratified assessments of financial
implications. The Treasury has enjoyed some success in demanding reasons for
expenditure from ministers and officials.
As an instrument of intrastate accountability, however, treasury has limitations.
New institutions and departments, such as the National Planning Commission
and the Department for Economic development, have made it unclear where
responsibility for economic and budgetary policy lies. Late in 2009, the
presidency announced that the finance minister and his representatives would
be excluded from some key ministerial cluster committees and from parallel
committees of directors-general. These changes have created space for senior
ministers and officials to shape the allocation of financial resources politically.
In November 2010, during conflicts over the funding of Eskom’s build
programme, cabinet statements prejudged the deliberations of the cabinet
committee on the budget and pre-empted the contributions of the finance
minister himself, in what appeared to be a concerted attempt to erode treasury
authority (Butler 2010d).
As a result of cabinet system dysfunctions, moreover, the second order
accountability of the treasury itself has become problematic. Government
energy policy, for example, has been paralysed by ideological and institutional
confusion. The finance minister, acting on the advice of a five member
Guarantee Certification Committee staffed only by Treasury officials, allocated a
breathtaking R350bn in loan guarantees to Eskom in the course of late 2009 and
2010. To who in such circumstances is the treasury itself accountable?
The interface between public and private sectors
Economic development has long been associated with “Weberian”
characteristics in the public service. Two related studies (Evans and Rauch
1989, Rauch and Evans 1990) revisit and affirm Max Weber’s claim that state
administrations characterised by merit-based recruitment and stable long-term
career paths facilitate capitalist economic development. Chalmers Johnson’s
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(1995, 21-37) vision of an “apparatus of plan rationality” in post-war Japan
identifies an effective and professionalised senior bureaucracy as a key to
economic development; and Evans (1995) uses the notion of “embedded
autonomy” to capture the key features of a developmental bureaucracy.
In the post-1994 South African state there have been high levels of turnover and
mobility (Levin 2007, Cameron 2009). Managers are rarely held to account for
irregular or unauthorised expenditures (PSC 2008) and there has been an
increase in financial misconduct cases. A wider “empowerment state” is
arguably emerging in which relationships between business people, politicians
and the public bureaucracy have become enmeshed in patronage (Butler 2011).
Rather than exhibiting “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995) such a state is
characterised by disembeddedness punctuated by the capture of particular
officials by sectional interests. Recent public investments, for example in energy
or new-generation rail systems, seem to have been secured politically rather
than by social welfare calculations. The primary beneficiaries of such processes
are established businesses which use empowerment partnerships to maintain
traditionally anti-competitive positions.
Stronger regulation of public servants’ conflicts of interest is essential if the
growth of patronage is to be contained and the energies of state officials are to
be focused on their obligations. The management of conflicts of interest
between individuals’ roles as public servants and as directors of private
companies faces severe political obstacles. Both government and the ANC’s
leadership have each been deliberating inconclusively for a decade on the
business activities of politicians and officials. No viable political strategy has
yet been agreed for containing conflicts of interest, enforcing limits on
revolving doors, or curtailing family and social network patronage.
Party and state
The ANC describes itself as a liberation movement and its conception of
democratic revolution is incompatible with constitutional democracy (ANC
2007b). ANC leaders describe the movement as the strategic centre of power. Its
activists sometimes view liberal democratic institutions as western impositions
that entrench the privileges of the property-owning elite. Even moderate
constitutionalists sometimes claim that the movement will regulate the actions
of all public officials (Mantashe 2009).
A blurring of authority between party and state is now characteristic of all three
tiers of government. Relationships of authority between mayors, municipal
managers, and regional ANC barons are mediated through contested conceptions
of seniority. ANC offices are used to secure control of local state institutions;
and public municipal resources are used to fight local party battles.
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Provincial cabinets are often headed by weak premiers put in place by Luthuli
House. Provincial ANC leaders are able to destabilise these appointees and to
control resource allocation. ANC barons and executive office holders operate
according to dual accountability systems – to party and to state – in which lines
of authority and responsibility for action can never be made transparent.
At national level, the dominance of government over movement that
characterised the Mbeki era has been partially overturned. State officials
possess resources of knowledge and public authority that political party
functionaries cannot match. Nevertheless ANC policy committees and office
bearers intervene endlessly in the business of government.
The movement did not use the recent period of economic stability to induct its
own cadres into liberal democratic values and respect for public authority. An
increasingly factionalised liberation movement is not today ideologically
amenable to the introduction of stronger systems of public accountability.
Conclusions
A more capable state is essential if South Africans are to enjoy a prosperous
future. Such a state cannot be created and sustained if those who govern
through it are not held accountable for their actions by citizens and intrastate
agencies. Without answerability, a culture of justification, and sanctions for
improper conduct, state power will be abused and dissipated.
The immediate political costs of building an accountable state are significant.
An ethically compromised ANC leadership no longer possesses the moral
resources to mobilise activists in support of politically divisive reforms. Years
of deliberation about the regulation of conflicts of interest and the curtailment
of patronage relationships have not resulted in realistic commitments to
change.
Vertical accountability of the political elite to the people will remain
compromised by an unbalanced party system and by the limited legitimacy of
liberal civil society institutions. Horizontal accountability will continue to be
hampered by the politicised control of state agencies and by the ruling elite’s
ambivalence about the predominance of constitutional government. The public
service lacks the meta-level skills required to reconfigure its own organisational
and accountability systems.
Vertical accountability can perhaps be enhanced by political activism, the
mobilisation of civil society organizations, and the defence of a variegated
media. Exposure of corruption and reputational damage to those who commit it
may be made more effective if disenchantment with political leaders deepens.
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The use of harder legal sanctions for illegal behaviour may conceivably become
more widespread when demonstrable abuses of public authority are uncovered.
The obstacles to enhanced accountability, both technical and political, are
immense. It is evident that political accountability can only ever be a
provisional and partial accomplishment.
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