The Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has called for an overhaul of how political parties are run and how they choose leaders.

“An ongoing lack of effective political governance will continue to undermine efforts to increase the efficacy of the state,” the state-owned development financier said in Development Report 2011: Prospects for South Africa’s Future, published on Monday.

Improving the quality of political governance in the short term would involve “optimising the quality of political leadership in priority areas and ministries”, the DBSA said.

The long-term solution was to have public leaders who understood how government worked and what it took to deliver on promises. Such leaders had to be able to “communicate clearly and effectively so as to engender trust”.

“How political leaders are chosen therefore becomes vital. It is important to develop effective models to improve the leadership development and deployment processes of political parties,” it said.

“This would involve defining the standards and competency requirements – innate abilities, skills and knowledge – for different political roles within the state; improving deployee assessment processes; creating proper career paths within the party and government; and revising training and development programmes.”

Developmental interventions of the kind South Africa’s challenges called for required consistent implementation of policies over a long period. Such implementation had to withstand changes of government or political leadership.

“This, in turn, necessitates a stable bureaucracy that has enough institutional depth to follow through on a long-term reform agenda, even if bureaucratic or political leaders change from time to time.”

Countries with high levels of political instability caused by changes in the ruling party or between factions within the same party often struggled to sustain a long-term reform agenda because political instability spilled over on to the civil service.

The imperative under such circumstances, the DBSA said, must be to structure an appropriate relationship between the party and the state, whereby the party “has sufficient control over the state to carry out its policy agenda”.

But such control had to be counterbalanced by a civil service with sufficient autonomy to maintain administrative stability, it said. - Political Bureau