China has offered models of development that we can choose to follow.
In South Africa's state, performance measures of senior managers have very little to do with the strategy and tactics of the mandating party. This weakens the hegemony of the party over the top echelon of the bureaucracy.
Factor in the reality that even the medium-term strategic framework is not the basis of key performance indicators for the senior civil service and a more complicated picture emerges. At least there is now work being done to locate the National Development Plan at the centre of the state's performance-management system.
Conservatives might celebrate this gap for the strategic distance it puts between the executive and the bureaucracy but the reality is that this conundrum stunts the ability of the executive to hold the bureaucracy accountable. In the end, the public is disadvantaged because the bureaucracy is supposed to implement programmes in the electoral mandate of the governing party.
Eventually, too many perverse incentives are created in the system. Senior managers can trick the current performance-management system to get the best results from it with very limited effort and effect.
It is increasingly desirable that senior managers be judged by how they are transforming society, not primarily by whether they get clean audit reports or meet quantitative targets. Qualitative measures of performance need to be applied indicators such as impact, efficiency, replicability and sustainability should frame assessments.
Compliance officers
Such an approach would alter thinking; senior bureaucrats would begin to see their role as change agents, not just compliance officers.
In China and other countries in East Asia, senior bureaucrats, like their post-World War II French counterparts (known as mandarins), are conscientious, self-driven reformers. They initiate change and innovation. Hence, in 30 years China has achieved what it took the West more than 200 years, with civil wars and revolutions, to achieve.
As an aspirant developmental state, South Africa needs a similar orientation. Senior managers should see themselves as change agents with the mandate, authority and will to transform society under the authority of the executive. The Constitution, the Public Service Act and the Public Finance Management Act gives them the authority to do so.
We should not be post-colonial copycats. But we should, as in the evolution of South Africa itself, embrace international experiences, borrow from the best progressive traditions, infuse our own traditions and innovations and thus produce the best we can under the circumstances. We should learn from the successes and failures of others, especially those in East Asia, Scandinavia and Latin America, those who stood with us during the hard times of colonialism and apartheid.
Then there is China: unlike the West, China has not imposed on us manuals of how to run the state and the economy. They are offering the world their own experiences and models and leaving the rest to us to choose from and implement them.
We need to unlock the political-administrative contradictions in this. The bureaucrats' wait-and-see posture is counterproductive. As politicians reform laws governing the public service so should senior managers innovate and lead internal management reforms, including changing management practices, setting bold goals and targets for themselves and the people they manage.
There is already a precedent for germinating the seeds of a senior management revolution. We all know how the South African Revenue Service and the home affairs department have been transformed.
Among the key elements of these success stories are:
- Clear goal setting, containing quality of service and speed of delivery;
- Cohesion: all levels of the organisation work towards a common goal;
- Exercise of leadership by senior managers: executives who lead by example, implement relevant training programmes, motivate staff and open up space for career advancement;
- Innovation: adaptation of latest technologies, thinking, organisational models and systems that improve efficiency and impact; and
- Customer orientation that puts people first — not what benefits and accolades managers derive from occupying senior positions.
The need for urgent reforms is undisputed. They should start with senior managers in the state and state-owned enterprises having a national conversation to answer the question: As a generation, will we discover or betray our revolutionary mission of uplifting the wellbeing of all South Africans?
The mandate of the first post-1994 generation of mandarins was to build a single government for South Africa, having amalgamated all the disparate administrations of the bantustans and the apartheid state.
The second generation of bureaucrats take credit for extending the provision of social and economic services to the majority.
What will the current generation be remembered for? What change are we leading? How are we changing the course of history?
The mandarins should translate the political mandate into measurable short-, medium- and long-term plans. They must adopt and adapt modern change-management and continuous-improvement practices. They should put the public first, in accordance with batho pele. But, most of all, they should demonstrate the highest level of appreciation and commitment to the project of building a national democratic society.
It starts with the imagination. What we think of ourselves, what we imagine our historic role to be, will determine where we feature in the chronicles of post-apartheid transformation.
Busani Ngcaweni works in the presidency. He recently studied economic and social policy development models at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences