In South Africa, we often judge the state's capability by the qualifications of the people who work in it.
When a municipality fails, we examine the credentials of its manager and councillors. When a project stalls, we ask whether the government has enough engineers, planners, economists or project managers. Such questions matter, especially where specialist posts remain vacant, but they do not explain why institutions staffed by qualified people can still struggle to fulfil their mandates.
Qualifications belong to individuals, while the ability to deliver public goods depends on how people work within institutions. A capable engineer cannot indefinitely compensate for unreliable procurement, poor information, unstable leadership, confused delegations or the absence of competent colleagues. Equally, it makes little sense to hold an official responsible for a decision that someone else has the authority to make. If we want to understand state capability, we must examine the conditions under which knowledge and skill can be put to work.
Capacity and capability are related, but they are not interchangeable. Capacity describes the resources available to an institution: qualified personnel, finance, information, technology and lawful authority. Capability is demonstrated when an institution can combine those resources to fulfil its mandate, solve problems and adapt when circumstances change.
Skills belong primarily to individuals, while capability emerges from relationships among people, systems and institutions. This distinction matters because governments can increase their capacity by recruiting more professionals or allocating larger budgets without improving their capability to deliver. The missing element may lie in fragmented authority, weak coordination, political interference, poor institutional memory or procedures that prevent people from exercising their judgement.
Qualifications, therefore, remain necessary, particularly in specialist functions, but they cannot substitute for an institution that knows how to organise expertise around a public purpose and carry decisions through to implementation.
The distinction becomes clearer when capability is viewed as a property of a system rather than a collection of credentials. At the Stan Sangweni Annual Lecture, former President Kgalema Motlanthe used aviation to illustrate this point. No airline assumes that employing qualified pilots settles the question of safety. Pilots depend on engineers, maintenance, air traffic control and recurrent training, while incidents and near misses must become knowledge available to the wider system.
Public servants similarly require institutions that coordinate expertise, preserve knowledge and correct failure. Qualifications place competent people in the cockpit; institutional capability determines whether the wider system enables them to perform.
South Africa has produced no shortage of policy ambition. Over three decades, we have accumulated legislation, commissions, diagnostic reports and development plans, yet we continue to find it difficult to turn political decisions and public resources into sustained administrative action.
Implementation is sometimes treated as the predictable consequence of adopting a policy and allocating a budget. In practice, procurement takes longer than expected, economic conditions change, communities respond in unforeseen ways and institutions that were meant to cooperate pursue different priorities. The assumptions made when a programme was designed may no longer hold when it reaches the people it was meant to serve.
These difficulties are unavoidable in public administration; institutional performance depends on how they are addressed when they arise. Capable institutions identify problems while there is still time to respond, retain knowledge gained during implementation and adjust their methods without losing sight of their mandate. They need sufficient stability to build competence over time, as well as the judgment and authority to act when circumstances change. This capacity to learn is as consequential as the skills of any one official.
Professionalisation must therefore continue well beyond a qualification or appointment. Experienced pilots return to simulators as technologies, procedures and responsibilities change. A technically accomplished professional who becomes a director-general, municipal manager or chief executive of a state-owned enterprise faces a comparable change in responsibility. Leadership of a public institution requires knowledge of finance, procurement, risk, ethics, organisational management and the relationship between elected leaders and the administration. Training acquired for an earlier profession cannot be assumed to cover all these responsibilities.
The National Framework towards Professionalisation of the Public Sector recognises the importance of continuous development and professional and ethical standards. Its value will be measured by what happens in recruitment, appointments, supervision and the daily conduct of institutions. Training an official repeatedly achieves little if that person returns to a workplace where decisions cannot be made, experienced colleagues keep leaving, and systems fail to support the work. The institution itself must provide a setting in which professional judgement can be exercised.
Vacancies, prolonged acting appointments, leadership instability and political-administrative tensions are connected in this respect. A vacancy can leave authority uncertain; repeated leadership changes interrupt programmes and erode institutional memory; blurred responsibilities make it harder to determine who made a decision and who should be held accountable for its consequences. An institution caught in this cycle spends too much of its energy managing uncertainty within its own ranks. These conditions do not arise outside politics. Appointments, delegations and the enforcement of accountability involve choices, and technical remedies will have limited effect if the choices that reproduce instability remain untouched.
Democratic governments are elected to set priorities and make political choices, while administrations are responsible for translating those mandates into lawful and effective action. There is no useful purpose in pretending that politics can be sealed off from administration, but political direction must not displace professional and statutory responsibility.
Administrators, for their part, cannot invoke technical expertise to disregard the democratic mandate. The relationship works when political executives provide direction, accounting officers exercise their lawful authority, and both are held to account for decisions within their respective responsibilities.
Authority must be matched with accountability and with the means to act. Senior leaders need enough time to understand their institutions, build teams and carry programmes through implementation, although tenure can never become immune from scrutiny. If leaders are replaced whenever priorities shift, the institution repeatedly loses the knowledge it needs to improve. If they remain in office despite persistent failure, stability loses its public purpose. The task is to establish conditions in which leadership can be both durable and answerable.
Development also requires institutions to work under uncertainty. An intervention that succeeds in one municipality cannot be assumed to have the same effect in another with a different history, economy or administrative capacity. Institutions must diagnose the problems they actually face, coordinate across organisational boundaries and revise their approach when experience exposes a mistaken assumption. At times, they may have to make substantial changes rather than proceed through a prescribed sequence of reforms. That judgment cannot be supplied by a manual alone.
For these reasons, the claim that South Africa has an incapable state tells us too little. Capability coexists with profound dysfunction, sometimes within the same department or municipality. We should ask how institutions that perform under difficult conditions recruit and retain people, organise authority, preserve institutional memory and respond when implementation goes wrong. We should then examine which practices can endure elsewhere and what political and institutional conditions would allow them to take root.
The number of officials trained, qualifications obtained, and frameworks adopted may reflect effort, but it cannot, by itself, establish progress. We should instead look at whether decisions are made and implemented, whether problems are resolved during implementation, whether institutions work together more reliably, and whether citizens experience a closer alignment between what the government promises and what it delivers. South Africa needs qualified people in critical areas of the state, but their expertise will have public consequences only where institutions enable them to use it. Building capability is, therefore, continuous work in the organisation and government of the state.
Busani Ngcaweni (Johannesburg Business School), Bontle Lerumo (Public Sector Education and Training Authority) and Phindile Mkwanazi (National School of Government)