It should not be about race. Nor gender. Nor family, social connections nor party membership. Merit should be the only criterion when making senior appointments.
That’s not the rote rhetoric of a hard-hearted reactionary, indifferent to the need for transformation. That’s the opinion of Barbara Hogan, someone who has spent a lifetime immersed in the ideology of change.
A lifetime member of the ANC, she spent eight years in prison for high treason. She was married to Ahmed Kathrada, Struggle hero, treason triallist, and SACP luminary.
This week, Hogan told the Zondo Commission: “It cannot be that closeness to or membership of the ANC, or any of its alliance structures, or to factions within these structures, should be the determining factors in the selection of candidates for senior positions.
“In this day and age, there are a host of capable black and white professionals (women and men) from which to choose.”
This is something of an about-face on the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment and its stalking horse, affirmative action. But then Hogan has seen the reality of the policy.
In 2009, she was appointed by Kgalema Motlanthe as health minister, tasked with rescuing that department from the damage caused by that alcoholic beetroot-purveyor, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
She then survived for 18 months, a comparatively long period in a Jacob Zuma Cabinet, as the minister of public enterprises, before being fired for resisting the state capture project.
There’s been no need to follow the proceedings of the Zondo Commission to know that state institutions have been hijacked. We all have first-hand experience of a government that is increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional.
Many ministries are barely operative. As did his predecessor Thabo Mbeki to a lesser degree, Zuma chose ministers and their deputies overwhelmingly on the basis of personal loyalty rather than merit.
Potentially, the delivery of state services can survive such lacklustre, revolving-door political masters. A professional public service has institutional memory and loyalty to the administrative process, not to a fickle political patron.
Unfortunately, the civil service has been gutted. At a senior level, virtually no career public servants remain; just a steady procession of highly-paid political appointments.
Last year, the Institute of Race Relations analysed the extraordinary amount of cadre churn in Zuma’s administration. Over an eight-year period, in the 38 existing government departments, 172 people held the position of director-general, each holding the post for an average of 22 months.
If the likes of Hogan and President Cyril Ramaphosa have belatedly embraced the idea of a meritocracy, that’s good news.
But it’s not going to be a simple matter to implement.
Deployment is key to the party and its allies. The ANC is an enormous, self-fuelling engine of patronage. If Ramaphosa and his merry band want to retain their precarious hold on power, they, too, will have to use deployment.
As DA leader Mmusi Maimane points out in an open letter to Ramaphosa, the ANC stated more than two decades ago that its policy was to capture control of every aspect of the state by deploying loyal cadres to key non-political positions.
Ramaphosa, himself, announced the launch of the “Decade of the Cadre” in 2012.
Targets included the military, the judiciary, and chapter nine institutions, all of which the Constitution envisaged as non-partisan.
It is cadre deployment that has delivered us into the hands of a public protector who is more of a political assassin than an independent investigator, as well as the hopelessly biased SA Human Rights Commission.
A further problem is that once deployed and affirmatively-actioned, the people appointed are difficult to dislodge.
Disgraced former SA Revenue Service commissioner Tom Moyane this week launched a High Court application to reverse his firing and block the appointment of a successor.
Also fighting his dismissal is former Transnet chief executive Siyabonga Gama. So, too, did Shaun Abrahams at the National Prosecuting Authority. And Hlaudi Motsoeneng at the state broadcaster.
The ANC will not – cannot – relinquish deployment. And deployment makes state capture not an aberration, but an inevitability.