The state of the state: institutional transformation, capacity and political change in South Africa, by Louis A. Picard, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2005, 390 pp., £26.50 (paperback), ISBN 9781868144198
‘Colonialism in Africa included a cultural hegemony that fractured pre-colonial institutions.’ (p. 15)
‘By 1999, the most pressing problem facing the Government of National Unity was its own bloated and corrupt public service.’ (p. 278)
The book starts its examination of the evolution of the modern state in South Africa by explicating the conceptual frontiers of the institutional state in the post-apartheid era. It delves into the unfolding transformation of the state via bureaucratic processes by reflecting on the political control structures of the past that have subsequently resurfaced as defining challenges in the task of state-building undertaken by the non-racial government: the development of a non-racial public service, a viable policy-making process for economic development, and enhanced public-private sector capacity as the engine of economic growth. Picard avers:
The new non-racial government in South Africa after May, 1994 inherited from the state system an authoritarian local level state administration that is tolerant of corruption and the institutionalised use of patronage in the public sector to advance Afrikaner ethnic claims. This inherited institutionalised state dampened economic and social development and weakened the evolution of democratic civil society. (p. 5)
Through the prism of the institutional state, the author undertakes in-depth analysis of the legacy of colonialism on the state in Africa. Picard draws on Crawford Young's theory of the African colonial state (1994), and the legacies of its institutional form for understanding the frailties of its post-colonial successor. He emphasises that throughout Africa colonialism ruptured the evolving state system and in most cases pre-colonial polities were destroyed. As a consequence, the colonial system can be seen as having given birth to the modern post-colonial state (p. 15). Thus, central to the institutionalised state argument is an analysis of how colonialism resulted in what Mamdani (1996) calls the ‘alien and bifurcated’ nature of the post-colonial state. Picard employs this framework to examine how the colonial legacy resulted in a bifurcated state bureaucracy in South Africa during the period of Afrikaner monopoly of the civil service.
Subsequently the book historically contextualises the racialisation of politics in South Africa. Picard employs the Afrikaans slogan ‘Ba antjies viv Boeties’ meaning ‘for pals’ as a conceptual framing device in his exploration of the historical antecedents of the post-colonial racialisation of politics. He examines the ‘imperialisation’ of the bureaucracy through patronage politics during the rise of the apartheid National Party, whose xenophobic and white supremacist ideology soon became the established ideology of the South African state. He explores the broader question of the nature of the transition from the apartheid to the non-racial era by focusing particularly on the challenges that shaped the institutional capacity-building process in South Africa as a result of the inherited legacy of minority rule. In particular, one aspect of the attempt to overcome the inherited institutional legacy of the past is the affirmative action strategies taken for public sector reform, regarding areas such as human resource and planning capacity, efficiency and effectiveness in the bureaucracy. The aim of affirmative action in South Africa was to promote equal opportunity, to increase ethnic or other forms of diversity at all levels of society, and to redress perceived disadvantages due to overt, institutional discrimination.
These enquiries lead the author to confront the question of why, despite the institutional transition and reorganisation of the South African civil service, its bureaucratic system remains dysfunctional due to the lack of human resource development, and will and capacity to implement public sector reform policies. This brings to the fore the notion of transition without transformation in the ‘new’ South Africa. Picard's analysis of the ‘grand corruption’ orchestrated via the bureaucratic institutions of the state in both apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa is compelling. It serves to highlight how the enduring problems of patronage and corruption undermine the state's capacity to foster effective and efficient bureaucracy planning for development in Africa. He posits, ‘levels of corruption are a good measure of the extent to which an institutional state has become dysfunctional’ (p. 246). Picard's analysis reveals how the pervasiveness of corruption over four years after the transition has precipitated economic stagnation and decline in civil service productivity.
In seeking to understand these enduring problems, Picard critically examines the failure of the public sector during the apartheid era and how this institutional legacy remained a salient feature of the new non-racial government that came into power in May 1994. Picard argues that during the four decades under apartheid, the bureaucracy functioned as a major patronage network. This pattern of interest group articulation in the public service has continued to be manifest through favouritism and pervasive corruption in the new South Africa. This phenomenon has proved a major challenge to capacity-building initiatives as well as undermining measures to restructure the public service. Picard's book ends by exploring the implications of the new transition on the institutional state thereafter by reflecting on the Thabo Mbeki years.