CAPE TOWN, South Africa – In Washington, D.C., federal officials worry about “Schedule F,” a Trump-era idea revived to reclassify thousands of career officials as political appointees. In London, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK agitates for a “power project” to seed ministries with ideological loyalists. Across the democratic world, the professional civil service is under siege, its neutrality recast as a weakness.
Yet in Pretoria, something rare is unfolding. South Africa, a younger democracy, is doing the opposite. Its Public Service Amendment Bill (PSAB), now on the cusp of being passed by the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) following recent deliberations, aims to hard-wire professionalism into law.
It removes hiring and firing powers from ministers, hands them to career officials, and bars senior civil servants from holding party posts. In effect, South Africa is trying to legislate the very separation between politics and administration that older democracies are busy dismantling.
The Ghosts of State Capture
This move is a direct response to South Africa’s recent past. The country is still recovering from the era of “state capture,” a period when powerful networks of political elites and private business interests systematically looted state resources and hollowed out key institutions. A key enabler was the notorious policy of cadre deployment: appointing loyal party comrades to public posts, regardless of merit.
The PSAB’s design is surgical, targeting the pressure points where patronage seeps in.
What the Bill Actually Does
The headline reform transfers key human-resources powers from ministers to professional heads of department. Hiring, promotion, performance management, and disciplinary action for senior officials will be handled by Directors-General, not political bosses.
“Why would you have heads of departments if you are not going to give them their responsibility and hold them accountable?” quips Advocate Kholeka Gcaleka, the country’s Public Protector, in support of the change.
For Gcaleka, who has investigated countless cases of capture and abuse, this is a long-overdue correction: ministers will set policy and monitor delivery, while directors-general will actually run departments day-to-day and be held accountable for results.
The companion reform is a clear barrier between senior administrators and party politics. Section 36A of the PSAB will prohibit Directors-General, provincial heads, and those directly reporting to them from holding office in a political party. This is a targeted ban aimed at the very top echelons, a compromise after an earlier draft sought to ban all 1.2 million public servants from party positions.
Labour unions, led by COSATU’s Mathew Parks, blasted the early version as unconstitutional overreach, forcing the compromise that narrowed restrictions to top managers. That, says Parks, “is rational and fair and can pass constitutional muster,” aligning with recent court rulings upholding similar limits for municipal managers.
For watchdogs like Gcaleka, the logic is simple: “How do you manage the political–administrative interface if, after you leave this room, you are equals?” If a Director-General is simultaneously a party baron, their loyalty to the public could be compromised. By neutralizing these conflicted loyalties, the reform aims to ensure that senior officials serve the constitution, not party HQ.
An Independent Referee
This internal balance is reinforced by an external one. In parallel to the PSAB, lawmakers are advancing changes to strengthen the Public Service Commission (PSC), transforming it into a fully independent Chapter 9 institution with investigative and enforcement powers.
As DA lawmaker Jan Naudé de Villiers, who chairs Parliament’s portfolio committee on public service, put it, without an independent referee, meritocracy remains theoretical. The PSC’s enhanced powers give the new rules bite, deterring political overreach and giving administrators a lawful shield when they refuse improper instruction.
The Reformer’s Voice in South Africa
South Africa’s recent history proved that blurring the line between party and state breeds corruption and ineffectiveness. “The historical record provides overwhelming evidence that where democracies fuse the political and administrative, they tend towards corruption and ineffectiveness,” argues Ivor Chipkin, a public scholar of more than 30 years and executive director of the New South Institute (NSI), contending that truly autonomous, professional bureaucracies are what allow democracies to translate mandates into results.
Few people embody both the challenges and promise of reform like Yoliswa Makhasi. After 25 years in the public service, including a term as Director-General of the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), she now directs the Public Service Reform Programme at the NSI.
In a 22 July hearing before Parliament’s upper house, the National Council of Provinces, Makhasi described the Public Service Amendment Bill as “a critical institutional advancement,” arguing that the state’s performance has long been undermined by blurred lines between political and administrative authority. For Makhasi, these episodes—highlighted by the Zondo Commission at state-owned entities like Eskom and Transnet—show why insulating the civil service from partisan leverage is essential.
The Bill, she argues, is designed precisely to prevent such interference, regardless of which party is in office. Her point is not abstract. It flows from years of watching how even well-intentioned political interventions can unravel carefully built capacity, and how decent administrators can be sidelined when partisan considerations intrude upon hiring, promotion, and dismissal.
Lessons Written in Scars
South Africa’s appetite for institutional hardening is not ideological; it is born of bitter experience. Over the past decade, a sprawling corruption network—exposed in detail by the Zondo Commission of Inquiry—showed how patronage appointments eroded state capacity. Eskom, the national power utility, was driven to the brink of collapse, triggering rolling blackouts that hobbled the economy.
Transnet, the freight-rail operator, faltered as contracts were captured by cronies. Even the South African Revenue Service, once a model for the continent, lost expertise and credibility after politically connected officials were installed at the top. The pattern was clear: when political loyalty eclipses competence, accountability unravels and institutions buckle.
Unlike countries that inherited professional civil services long ago and now take them for granted, South Africa treats professionalism as a fragile, hard-won achievement that must be protected in law. The PSAB is not the start but the codification of a long policy journey.
It follows the 2022 Framework for the Professionalization of the Public Service, which sketched the philosophy and standards for recruitment, development, and accountability. Where that framework provided strategy, the PSAB provides legal mechanisms designed to endure beyond any single administration.
During a recent webinar, Deputy Minister Pinky Kekana stressed that professionalization needs firm legal grounding and cannot be left to policy instruments alone.
Democratic Maturity as Debate
If democratic maturity is the habit of arguing in public about important things, then the NCOP hearings are a case study. Six provinces, including Gauteng and Limpopo, have already signalled their support for the Bill, while three, KwaZulu-Natal, Free State, and the Western Cape, are holding out.
The Western Cape, South Africa’s best-performing province by many metrics, has raised constitutional concerns that the Bill risks creating accountability without authority – a classic governance paradox.
Yet this is not obstructionism; it is part of the process. South Africa’s provinces are constitutionally empowered to scrutinize national laws, propose amendments, and test their resilience against different governance models.
The Bill’s authors answer by pointing to Schedule 2 (retained executive levers) and to the logic that professional appointments, insulated from partisan influence, ultimately make executive accountability more meaningful: politicians are judged for policy and oversight, administrators are judged for execution, and both sets of judgments are clear.
The contrast with cruder arguments for patronage is striking. When Bathabile Dlamini, a former minister and ANC women’s league former president, recently defended the practice of “rewarding loyal members with positions” as necessary for party cohesion, she gave voice to a worldview the Bill explicitly repudiates: the state exists for the public, not for party networks.
The very fact that South Africa is publicly wrestling with where to draw the line rather than doubling down on loyalty rewards is itself a marker of institutional health.
Why This Matters Beyond South Africa
Seen in a vacuum, the PSAB might read like bureaucratic housekeeping. Seen against global trends, it reads like a counter-narrative. Where some democracies are exploring how to politicize their permanent bureaucracies, South Africa is exploring how to de-politicize its own. Where others treat the apolitical civil service as an obstacle to be tamed, South Africa treats it as a public good to be protected.
This is not to say the country is blind to the dangers of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Quite the opposite: Schedule 2 explicitly empowers political executives to act against failing administration, but within a rule-bound process that aims to prevent vendetta politics. The idea is not to create a priesthood beyond scrutiny; it is to create a professional corps bound by skills, standards, and law.
The wider African context underscores that institutional innovation is not the monopoly of wealthy democracies. Rwanda’s Imihigo performance contracts have aligned incentives with results; Kenya’s digitized Huduma centres have streamlined service delivery and cut opportunities for petty patronage; and, within South Africa, the Western Cape’s performance culture shows that professionalization pays. The PSAB is an attempt to legislate those lessons nationally, knitting together merit, accountability, and an independent referee.
The Human Stakes: Service Delivery and Trust
While it is tempting to treat a bill about appointments and schedules as technical, said de Villiers. “The human consequences of administrative weakness are felt in clinics without medicine, classrooms without teachers, water systems that fail, roads that crumble, and permits that never arrive.”
South Africans do not experience “governance failure” in footnotes. They live it in rolling blackouts, in watching ambulances arrive too late, in permits that never materialize. The PSAB’s wager is that competence beats proximity: that an administrator promoted for skill and track record will steward systems better than one promoted because a party committee deemed them loyal.
Institutional memory is an asset, acting appointments and constant churn destroy it. Clear lines of authority help fix problems faster; blurred lines ensure that everyone is “in charge” and no one is responsible. If the reforms work as designed, citizens, not officials, are the ultimate beneficiaries.
Politicians vs Professionals: Striking a Balance
Reforming the engine of government inevitably stirs debate about power and accountability. Not everyone is cheering the diminution of ministerial influence. The Western Cape Government (WCG), run by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the Public Service Amendment Bill—somewhat unexpectedly, given the DA’s loud opposition to ANC cadre deployment.
Dr Harry Malila, the province’s Director-General, warns that stripping ministers of hiring powers could reduce them to bystanders. “How can executives be held accountable if they can’t choose their own top team?” he asks. The WCG broadly supports professionalization but opposes the Bill in its current form, arguing that devolving HR management from executives to heads of department limits oversight and risks weakening governance coherence under section 125 of the Constitution. During submissions, the province advocated for clearer definitions (e.g., of the Minister’s ‘functional area’) and a balanced approach.
Supporters of the reform counter that accountability is not lost, it is just being realigned. Under the new system, Ministers will still set the strategic direction and can hold Directors-General to account via performance agreements and oversight mechanisms.
Crucially, the Bill explicitly provides a process for Ministers to intervene if a DG is underperforming; they may issue a directive and ultimately recommend dismissal if incompetence is proven. This was a deliberate concession to avoid creating untouchable mandarins.
De Villiers, who also chairs Parliament’s portfolio committee on public service, explains: “You don’t want a situation where every time a new minister comes in, they just fire the DG to bring in their own people—that creates instability. But the minister can still write a directive to a DG and say, you are failing at your job,” triggering an inquiry and potential removal.
Some purists wanted no political involvement at all in firing officials, “but I personally feel the ability of an executive authority to actually hold a DG to account must be legislated… when done correctly it is not political overreach.” De Villiers envisions the strengthened PSC stepping in as an independent watchdog to investigate any frivolous ministerial actions, ensuring checks and balances.
Should the Bill become law, Malila anticipates the first tangible improvement for Western Cape residents as greater consistency and speed in filling critical senior management positions, streamlining recruitment and enhancing service continuity.
As America toys with politicizing its bureaucracy and Britain entertains loyalist staffing schemes, South Africa is betting that democracy’s durability rests not on party muscle, but on the quiet competence of those who serve.
By: Fidelis Zvomuya, New South Institute
