The South African civil service is stuck in a downward spiral.
I have seldom seen such mealy-mouthed, postmodernist newspeak twaddle in the Mail & Guardian as that spewed by Ivor Chipkin and Sarah Meny-Gilbert ("Public sector 'manages' to fail", March 22).
Did they really need all that verbiage to say what everybody already knows – that government administration has gone for a loop under the influence of leftist ideologues and scandals, all on the back of the best disintegrative efforts of the large body of hopelessly incompetent and corrupt deployed cadres of the ANC in senior civil service positions?
And hasn't the "senior management service" – vaunted by Chipkin and Meny-Gilbert as a potential saviour but manned by the same ideologues and incompetents – expanded from the initial 2 500 to "more than 10 000", only to provide even more jobs for cadre deployees with an even further decline in the functioning of government administration as a result?
The authors really stretched their ingenuity to its limits to avoid clearly stating that the functioning, largely effective and largely apolitical apartheid-era civil service was destroyed without an adequate replacement. – Maritz Spaarwater, Onrus River