CLAIRE BISSEKER: No accountability, no leadership equals no state capability

The National Planning Commission (NPC), which has been largely silent since the National Development Plan (NDP) was passed in 2012, has finally woken up after 10 years and discovered that its 30-year vision for the country has been ignored by the government.

Its response has been to issue a “call to action” to the rest of the country to get on board and somehow ensure it is implemented. 

The NPC’s timorous approach has rendered it irrelevant, if not outright complicit in SA’s descent over the past decade. So its call on civil society and business to help fix the country now, hand in hand with the same government that has failed it at every turn, is rather irksome.

This government has been offered a willing hand countless times but (despite the 11th-hour joint initiative with business formed in June) continues to spurn evidence-based policy, defend cadre deployment and confuse political expediency with a growth strategy. The need to create jobs remains subservient to a host of other priorities. 

The NPC, though not honest about its own failures, is at least honest in its reflection as to why the country has missed most of its social and economic targets by a mile. It blames the abandonment of the NDP, deteriorating state capacity and policy disarray, as well as deep-seated structural challenges, inadequate social development and corruption.

Instead of a capable state, on which the NDP was predicated, the NPC laments that we have a corrupt state; a disjointed planning system misaligned to the NDP’s goals; and economic policies that are achieving neither growth nor inclusiveness. Meanwhile, the need for social cohesion has fallen off the government’s radar, with South Africans experiencing some of the highest levels of violent interpersonal crime globally. 

However, the NPC still believes SA can get back on track. Only, it no longer thinks the state can do this alone, neither in terms of capacity nor funding. Given the need for fiscal sustainability and accepting that fiscal policy alone will not raise the enormous investment required in the areas of energy, water, transport and digital infrastructure, it sees the solution to SA’s problems in collaboration between the government and private sector.

This is something, it notes, that is already being attempted through the national infrastructure implementation programme, the sectoral master plan-driven growth programme, the just energy transition implementation programme, and the national state capability building programme.

Strangely, it omits the high-level government-business collaboration initiated in June by President Cyril Ramaphosa with Business for SA, which is trying to accelerate practical steps to fix the country’s biggest challenges in the areas of energy, logistics and crime. 

The parties provided a recent update and, according to business, there is tangible progress that it believes can be built upon to achieve real change. This is all well and good, but the initiative mainly tackles the symptoms rather than the causes of state failure. For lasting change, what is needed is for accountability to be tightened across all of the government. 

From the outset the NPC was worried that SA’s developmental agenda could fail because the state was incapable of implementing it. That was why more than half of the NDP was dedicated to the institutional reforms needed to improve service delivery. Unfortunately, most were never implemented. Accountability in the public sector remains pathetically weak, as is its ability to design and execute detailed policies. 

“Good policies don’t implement themselves,” former National Treasury director-general Lungisa Fuzile once told the Financial Mail. “They require leadership and strong institutions — and these require accountability.” 

Accountability and leadership are the missing ingredients. Without them there is only so much a whole-of-society approach can achieve. Unless the powerless NPC is prepared to do more than issue a report once a decade, the commissioners should quit en masse in protest. In fact, it’s something they should have done a long time ago. 

• Bisseker is a Financial Mail assistant editor.