Zola Skweyiya, Minister for Public Services and Administration, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
To drive into Transvaal House, where the behemoth Public Services Commission looms over its kingdom of Pretoria, you need to ascend a ramp and go through a security check next to a trash-filled dumpster.
The pungent concoction of koptoe security guard and rotting produce is a fragrance peculiarly appropriate for the work that goes on in the building, for this is the factory where they make the spokes to throw into wheels; where 435 people spend their lives preventing good government in the name of good government. Responsible for all decisions that involve staffing the national civil service, these are none other than the people who have set out to make reconstruction and development quite as ineffecient as apartheid ever was.
At the very top of the building, on the 22nd floor, are the offices of Zola Skweyiya, Minister for Public Services and Administration. He has what is perhaps the most difficult and most important job of anyone in Cabinet: to transform the civil service. At a press conference last week, he admitted that he didn’t even know exactly how many people his government — this country’s largest employer — had working for it: the bantustans managed to fold gravy into the most inaccessible of crevices. No wonder he carries with him, as a colleague describes it, “the air of a Dostoevsky novel, morose and austere, but with more than a little wry understanding of the situation he is in, a situation with a lot of responsibility and no power”.
His impotence stems from having no sway over the Public Services Commission (PSC), a statutory body over which he expected to wield political control, but which has been using him, rather, in his own words, “as a messenger boy between itself and Cabinet whenever they want something”. Until recently he did not even have his own staff. In fact, he had to apply to the PSC to get a staff so that he could begin to do the job that he felt they weren’t doing; little wonder they gave him the runaround too. This ain’t Dostoevsky. This is Kafka!
The minister himself has the demeanour of another age: on a balmy summer’s day he is to be found in a three-piece black woollen pinstripe suit. It’s funny to think that he is the exact contemporary of Chris Hani, with whom he left the country in 1962. Hani — perhaps because of his early death — is freedom’s Peter Pan, perpetually youthful; Skweyiya, on the other hand, possesses the dour mission- school gravitas of those who went through Lovedale and Fort Hare a generation before him — the Tambos, the Mandelas, the Govan Mbekis.
He was born in Simonstown in 1942, in the midst of several forced removals his family underwent during the de-Africanisation of the Western Cape. He understands grit: “If I had stayed in South Africa,” he says, “I would have landed up in jail or a drunkard, like everyone else I grew up with.”
He has a reputation for honesty and principle that, one colleague notes, “almost borders on the precious”. He is known for his inflexibility and his doggedness: “If he makes up his mind to do something, he does it doggedly,” says the colleague. “And if you stand in his way, he can make life very uncomfortable indeed” — a reference to his legendary temper. He is emotional: this comes out in the way he speaks, in spasms almost, as he describes his work and — more reluctantly — his life. Both have been difficult.
Another close colleague says that “he is not very articulate. So you measure him not by his words but by his actions.” In an interview he is affable and forthright. There is no slick politician here, no jive talker, no spin doctor. When the eyes twinkle — as they do periodically — one senses that this is the result of some internal motivation, rather than the external need to be pleasant to a journalist. He does not seem to have the ability to dissemble.
Recently married to Thuthu Mazibuko, the Deputy Director-General of Foreign Affairs, he lives in a flat atop Yeoville Ridge; he is happy there, but has been told by security to move. This has made him grumpy. “I thought of defying them and staying where I am,” he says, “but I was advised against it.” It is a measure of how long African National Congress exiles have been back that he talks of “community” in Yeoville — now abandoned by the new political elite – — with the same nostalgia as exiles once spoke of Lusaka.
Despite his low profile — he hates publicity — he is one of the most important decision- makers in the ANC: he sits on its National Working Committee and is a close confidante of Thabo Mbeki. One of his best friends and ideological sparring partners is Pallo Jordan. He has always been a “social democrat”, he says, even when it was unpopular. Some of his colleagues have accused him of “anti- communism”; the roots of this may have been a particularly difficult decade studying in East Germany, where he was profoundly troubled by the pervasive control of the state. “I don’t,” he says now, “like people telling me what to do.”
He is known as an “Africanist” — perhaps, he says, because of his “insistence that black empowerment should be part of democratisation. I don’t see progress or development without ensuring the economic upliftment of the oppressed people. Blacks must be part of the restructuring of the economics of this country and not only its politics. The ANC shouldn’t shy away from blacks becoming capitalists. The only question is — how do we achieve it?”
Perhaps it is his belief in the value of a black middle class that has made one part of his job — the rationalisation of the bantustan public services — so troubling. He acknowledges how difficult the issue is for the ANC: “These people, unlike the civil servants in Pretoria, are within the ANC’s own constituency. But when retrenchments begin to happen, these will affect them more than anyone, because people in the TBVC states simply don’t have the skills. They cannot
By no means is that the voice of a crude Africanist. Later in our conversation he mentions that “when we came here and we realised we were now employers [as opposed to freedom fighters], we had to see that we were employing human beings who, irrespective of their colour, have to be treated equally.” Indeed, his critics within the ANC — of which there are many — feel he has gone too far in accommodating white civil servants (he has excellent relations with the largely white Public Servants’ Association and troubled ones with the Cosatu-affiliated unions representing public servants).
Much criticism of Skweyiya comes from Cosatu and from his own comrades in Parliament — specifically the powerful Public Services Portfolio Committee, with which he has frequently clashed over the speed of the transition of the civil service. Many parliamentarians feel his worries about counter-revolution from within the ranks of the civil service led him, at first, to attempt too much to accommodate public servants. He is, they say, entirely responsible for the predicament he is in: his inherent conservatism and his legal background (he has a doctorate in law from Leipzig) made him too cautious. He thought he could work through the PSC, and he did not act quickly enough or decisively enough to put into place the overhaul of the civil service so necessary for delivery of the ANC’s promises.
There is, in his recent moves, a tacit acknowledgement of this. Beware! Zola has stirred. He has gone about setting up his own department and — most important — he has belatedly announced the establishment of a Presidential Review Commission, to be chaired by Nelson Mandela.
The PSC is “too rigid and inflexible. There is not a single minister, from any of the parties, who has not complained about how obstructive he or she finds them.” They are far too powerful; far more powerful, in fact, than similar commissions in other countries. “You can’t do anything in the public sector without consulting them, and so there’s a lot of tension around them.” He has come around to believing that they should simply have the power to monitor and maintain standards; executive and policy-making power must rest with him and his department.
Of course, he says, the first thing the Presidential Review Commission will do is look at the PSC: “It will have to anwer the question, is it necessary to have that commission, and if so, is the way it is working the right one?”
Skweyiya does speak his mind, even when his opinions are unpopular. He feels, for example, that the provinces must have more powers and that federalism has become unnecessarily demonised. He acknowledges too that, when the new government came in, “there was more emphasis on representivity within the public service than in changing the way the public service works”, and is particularly harsh on his party for its lack of preparation in the arena. The ANC has always been more interested in policy than in management, and so, while it had brilliant plans to bring housing, water, jobs, schooling and health to the people, it did not stop to think about what needed to happen institutionally to do this.
Once more, his critics feel that he must take at least some of the rap for this: he was given the responsibility for running the ANC’s Civil Service Unit. Remember, however, that he was simultaneously running the critical constitutional committee — the ANC has a tendency to overload its reliable workhorses.
In the next year, we’ll see whether Skweyiya can play the role of Action Man. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, one of Parliament’s rising stars and the chair of its committee on public service, speaks of how, in countries like Malaysia and New Zealand, “reforming the public service became a national obsession. We need T- shirts, slogans, a campaign, a profile, because nothing else happens until the civil service
Oy, vey. Please God, not another RDP or Masakhane campaign, all smoke and mirrors signifying state ideology rather than action. Perhaps Skweyiya’s trademark sobriety will prevent this: not even the media doctors who invented Clinton and Thatcher could transform him into a bushwhacking Camel Man, slashing through the red-tape vines of the bureaucratic jungle to bring a little light to the public service.
Skweyiya’s new salesperson is the glamorous ex- journalist, Thandeka Gqubule. If she can portray him, rather, as the trustworthy accountant, bringing reason and efficiency to the public service, she will have acquitted herself well.