The failure of government institutions, especially municipalities, poses an existential threat to the democratic project the country undertook since 1994.
The promise of “a better life for all” that the late president Nelson Mandela made in 1994 is dependent on well-functioning government institutions to be met.
The ineffectiveness of our governmental institutions has led to many challenges, including the runaway youth unemployment, a problem where a generational gap of knowledge and skills for industry is being created.
This dire situation calls for a closer look into the failure of government institutions.
The cliché is that poor political leadership, corruption, and the unionisation of the government sector, are the leading causes of this failure. There is an unwritten public consensus that changes in political leadership using the citizens’ right to vote will steer the country away from failing government institutions.
Even as I have no argument against the role, right, and importance of citizens being able to change governments in the greater scheme of a democratic system, I am still skeptical about the apparent belief that political stewardship alone will deliver everything, particularly working institutions.
Instead, government institutions that work can and should de-risk poor political leadership, rather than a situation where institutions rely on politics to work.
So, what should we be doing to strengthen government institutions? Well, the answer may well be right under our noses.
Government institutions, namely national departments, district and local municipalities, and other organs of state are, first and foremost, organisations before they are the government institutions we see and know them as.
Widely recognised author of modern management theory, Austrian-American Peter Ferdinand Drucker, says that “only three things happen naturally in organisations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership”.
Before we get carried away and think, “but wait, we told you it’s political leadership that’s missing,” Drucker also reminds us that “no institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organised in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.”
In the context of our topic, there are a couple of takeaways from Drucker’s theories. One is that, by definition, organisations are going to fail, and so you need to build active and working mechanisms to continually prevent them from failing.
Two, that organisations can work even with the weakest stewards, contrary to the belief that we need political strongmen to turn our public institutions around. Far from building strong institutions, politics must leverage the strength of (strong) institutions to produce political outcomes such as transformation.
As it stands, the design and functioning of our public institutions, especially government departments and municipalities, is vested mainly in structures and regulations. The logic is: once the structure is populated with personnel and functions within the letter – not even the spirit – of the regulations, then, possibly with the help of some good politics, institutions will deliver the results.
There is virtually nothing in place to mitigate the obvious cancers that attack organisations as soon as they are born, namely “friction, confusion, and under-performance”. It is in this context that it is not a common occurrence that government institutions undertake an organisational turnaround programme in the same way as you will find in large, medium, and even smaller private organisations.
This lack of appreciation of what it takes for organisations to work effectively exponentially increases the odds of failure of government institutions.
There is indeed an ever-pressing need for government institutions to, alongside the constraints and limitations of regulations and structures, continually review and tighten their governance systems, outline strategies to achieve their legal mandates, and review their operating models to ensure they align with their strategy.
Furthermore, these institutions must review their processes to make sure they are fit for purpose to meet their strategic objectives, ensure their technology evolves with their processes, and that their people are trained, skilled, and qualified to perform their jobs.
Finally, these institutions must have the right culture deliberately inculcated across all levels, and more importantly, and to Ducker’s point, have leadership that is leading these institutions appropriately.
Of course, these are not easy undertakings, but they are necessary for the performance and sustainability of any organisation, and, as it stands, very little in this regard is provided for in our system of management of government institutions.
The closest mitigation of failure we have, which can be linked to ‘leadership’, is sections 139 and 100 and their related provisions for intervention by one share of government when another sphere fails.
The idea of intervention is great, but what is key is the form and content of the intervention. The big question is, do these interventions focus on diagnosing and curing these known cancers? The answer is of course NO!
The interventions tend to focus on seconding individuals for the purpose of them providing leadership when they arrive in these institutions; for them to do more enforcement of the structure and regulations. The result is that even with the greatest exhibit of leadership, if the system does not empower them to address the underlying issues that make organisations work as stipulated above, very little impact is made.
The good news is that all is not lost, as government is beginning to improve its intervention methods. Lately, they have started experimenting with sourcing capacity from the private sector as exemplified by the National Cabinet Representative (NCR) process at Mangaung Metro Municipality in the Free State, and Enoch Mgijima Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape.
Even though it is still early days to talk about the successes or failures of this new model, what has become clearer, even with the little data gathered, is that instead or merely adding into the authoritative and oversight capacity to support these distressed organisations, private sector capacity would be best utilised to cure the patient.
The cure would focus on those specific aspects that are broken across governance, strategy, operating model, business processes, technology, people, and culture inside an organisation.
This capacity and the accompanying capability would then be provided to government ‘administrators’ who provide authoritative and administrative oversight to the organisation to turn it around, while also delivering on immediate service delivery needs.
The use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) should therefore not be limited to major infrastructure projects. It must, as part of the solution to institutional failure, be capacitated institutionally.
In this way, we can restore, strengthen, and grow public institutions to have them outlive current and future political stewards across all spheres of government.
And with that, Mandela’s promise of “a better life for all” – so beholden to these institutions working – can become a reality for all South Africans.
Alex Mabunda is Group CEO at Ntiyiso Consulting Group.