The Mail & Guardian’s recent directors general scorecard was interesting, but my experience suggests that the optimism of the accompanying editorial might be misplaced. Certainly, the evaluation of my successor, Jabu Sindane, was somewhat unfair because a flawed process handed him a poisoned chalice. In the current draft of my book, I describe how the way that he was appointed almost certainly set him up for failure.
During the January 2005 lekgotla, the president asked a few DGs to say what they thought about the capacity of the state and the situation of the public service. Sensible ones took the safe route and talked about how team-building exercises and site visits with their staff were very useful to build performance.
When my turn came, I decided to take the question seriously. I reflected on nearly 30 years in different public service roles and the phases that they had passed through.
I had left London just before Margaret Thatcher arrived to decimate British local government and had been shocked, when I visited a few years later, just how quickly public institutions could be gutted. I referred to the disappointment of arriving in Mozambique, just as the ”mobilisation phase” gave way to the ”administrative phase”; although in South Africa we had moved straight to the administrative phase, there had been no ”popular mobilisation” in the public service, which was a pity.
The next decade was going to see particular capacity challenges in the public service, I suggested, as the private sector responded to pressure for affirmative action by recruiting even more vigorously from government. As a result, there were going to be challenges finding the right competencies in core technical areas and strategies to mobilise potential candidates would be important.
Mention of Mozambique triggered Jacob Zuma, then deputy president of the country, to reminisce fondly about how, in the late 1970s, doctors in the Maputo Central Hospital had been expected to help sweep the wards. But Mojanku Gumbi, the president’s legal adviser, was clearly irritated when she passed me afterwards, saying that it was not true that there had been no mobilisation. The association with Zuma had probably not helped either.
My second contract ended in September 2005. After eight years, I was one of the longest-serving DGs but had indicated that I would be happy to serve for another few years to complete our restructuring and hand over in an organised way after addressing some of the outstanding challenges.
We needed to complete the reorganisation so that we could get our financial management in order — R80-million would have been wasted if we bought new accounting systems for units that were then transferred out of national government. There was a nasty case of corruption — a senior official had been caught taking payments from a consultant. And a crisis was brewing in the West Rand where gold mining companies, led by the late Brett Kebble, were trying to get government to carry hundreds of millions of rands of environmental costs while they walked away with the profits.
Sensitivities become obvious when, after an off the record meeting between the minister and the mining company, I was instructed to meet Kebble and sort out his problems. I told him government policy was that the polluter should pay. I don’t think that was the response he had been led to expect. Meanwhile, the corrupt official’s charge sheet was mysteriously rewritten in a manner that made conviction almost impossible; my efforts to fix it were met with a disapproving political silence.
Jabu Sindane, who had joined the department relatively recently as one of my deputies, was still getting to grips with key aspects of its mandate. He was appointed DG a few days before I left and had to take on all the baggage. There was no succession plan, although I had been pushing for a structured approach. The corrupt official stayed, which did not help departmental morale. It was never going to work.
In theory, ministers decide on DG appointments with the concurrence of the president. I had hoped for support from that source for an appropriate succession strategy. But when I probed, it appeared that the formal administrative channels had largely given way to a kitchen Cabinet approach, where the president gave his blessing in informal chats.
So the lekgotla intervention had probably sealed my fate. Given Zuma’s enthusiasm, Gumbi’s evident hostility and the challenges I was facing with then-minister Buyelwa Sonjica, there would be no structured succession.
If this is symptomatic of the way in which administration at senior levels of the public service is conducted, it isn’t healthy. Although DG appointments must have a political dimension to them, the overriding objective should be to establish effective and competent administration, not to serve the parochial interests of ministers. Leadership for that should come from the presidency. In this case, it didn’t.
Mike Muller, DG of water affairs and forestry from 1997 to 2005, is resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Centre in Italy, finishing a book on water policy during the first decade of democracy