Left to turn in the wind, subject to the whims of fortune

Here we are again, another year-end when as a country and a people we find ourselves deeply uncertain as to our imminent political future.

Late last week, we were left to speculate as to whether we would still have a president the following day, and if so, who that would be.

Whatever else might be said of this crisis, it seemed remarkable how little contingency planning there had been, how unanticipated had been the Section 89 panel’s report, how irrelevant it had seemed to plan for such an eventuality. We were left to turn in the wind.

In so many ways this sense of the country — subject to the whims of fortune — has been the narrative constructed for SA, for good and bad. Our transition to democracy is presented as this miracle delivered at a moment when the fates aligned, or as Seamus Heaney has said, when hope and history rhymed, when our past offered up a peerless set of leaders —a Mandela, a Kathrada.

There is no question that in many senses SA was fortunate, but that is to underplay the enormous amount of work, of careful, considered, calculated planning and policy-making that underlay the transition.

This narrative sometimes takes hold in the context of state capture too — as if the damage done was simply to arrest our potential to deliver democracy and realise the constitution. As if it was all still incipient and embryonic rather than destructive, as in the case of the SA Revenue Service (Sars), of very real progress and realisation, of carefully co-ordinated planning, of not just having the potential to be but actually being a revenue collection agency held up the world over as a model — and not simply for reflecting global best practice but for having modelled itself to the specifics and demands of SA’s reality.

The Helen Suzman memorial lecture delivered on Tuesday by former Sars deputy director Ivan Pillay reflected on the gritty, grindingly arduous work of capacitating state institutions. The work product of Sars, and the culture that prevailed there, wasn’ ta haphazard thing, some happy product of good fortune, a thumbsuck. The plans and policies that enabled it, the conditions that supported it, the processes and systems that managed and structured it — those all represented ferocious, painstaking, deliberative work.

Pillay summarised the current state of public administration: “Many of our managers and leaders are not systemic. We are mainly event- and transaction-driven interventionists. By continuous nonsystemic actions and instructions, we invariably break existing systems. There is little analysis, generation of options, objective selection of these options, nor sufficient design and realistic planning.

“We usually just make announcements. When that does not succeed — and it often does not, because we have broken the delivery mechanisms — we make even more announcements. From land distribution to fighting crime, the more we fail, the louder and more strident we become.”

Pillay’s lecture represents a hard-nosed look at what it means to build strong, capable institutions: “It will take painstaking and dogged determination, day after day, until traction is gained that will lead to successive years of repairing and improved productivity. Much like the effect of compound interest, sustained fixing and increased productivity over a number of years will grow the base-capability of state institutions. Of course, there will be opportunities for rapid progress. We should be ready to leverage such opportunities should they arise.”

But in seeking to counter the despondency that so many in SA feel, Pillay was careful not to offer any false hope. The land of miracles, if ever it once was, is not one we now inhabit. Parroting the soaring provisions of our constitution will not usher in the democracy we want. That requires the far more gritty, potentially tedious work of research, analysis, data collection, policy formulation, planning, systems building and compliance management.

That is what it is to build a capable state.