ANTHONY BUTLER: Leon Schreiber deploys his expertise in public sector reform

Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber is one of the more intriguing appointments to the government of national unity. A member of the National Assembly for just five years, he was previously best known for his dogged campaign for the release of ANC national deployment committee minutes. Before that he was a fierce advocate of the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction at his alma mater, Stellenbosch, and the author of a prescient 2018 book Coalition Country.

What makes Schreiber’s rise of special interest is that he is an expert on public sector reform, with a PhD in political science (on social welfare systems) and three years of applied research experience at Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies (ISS) programme.

Addressing the Cape Town Press Club on Tuesday, Schreiber set out his agenda for change at home affairs, one that draws heavily on the ISS’s approach and explicitly calls for policy learning from other developing countries. 

Like all incoming ministers, Schreiber is keen to demonstrate that he is making an difference. He has chosen ending slow visa and permit processing — “no backlogs by Christmas” — as his immediate flagship intervention.

Here he hopes to replicate the turnaround initiated by then  director-general — and ANC veteran — Mavuso Msimang in the run-up to the 2010 Fifa World Cup. This reform is itself detailed in an ISS paper, “Reforming Without Hiring or Firing: Identity Document Production in SA 2007-2009”. 

Long wait times for IDs were caused by poorly designed processes and demoralised staff. Eschewing redundancies and working with trade unions, Msimang’s consultants simplified processes and used informal rather than formal performance measures to encourage teamwork. Waiting periods were reduced to just six weeks. 

Msimang credited continuous and positive engagement with front-line workers for his success. Schreiber likewise goes out of his way to praise “honest and dedicated officials” who continued to do their jobs in the face of understaffing and the “institutional vandalism” inflicted by ANC ministers. 

The new minister’s longer-term objective is “deep and meaningful” institutional reform driven by the deployment of new technologies. An ISS paper drafted by Schreiber himself in 2019 attributed much of the success of the City of Cape Town in averting a water supply Day Zero to improved data management and judicious technological interventions (though he also credits behaviour-changing communication strategies). 

Schreiber is a big fan of the SA Revenue Service (Sars), celebrating various organisational, managerial and technological changes that dramatically increased tax compliance and the pool of taxpayers under (ANC deployee) Pravin Gordhan. One special interest is evidently the revenue service’s digital platform, which verifies the authenticity of documents, provides instantaneous tax assessments to 5-million taxpayers and flags potential irregularities for further investigation. He believes just such a platform, secure and broadly user-friendly, could be created to serve home affairs’ far bigger client base. 

This is all dizzyingly ambitious, but Schreiber is evidently fortified by his knowledge that other developing countries have leapfrogged their peers by deploying new technologies effectively. The biggest immediate obstacle to his ambitions is Sita, the state’s own information technology agency, which will need to be circumvented if the new programme is to have any chance of success. Numerous further challenges will inevitably follow. 

Schreiber is surely also aware of the fate of previous reformers. Msimang was initiator and driver of the last major home affairs turnaround, but he received almost no credit for his achievements. Instead, ANC grandee Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was parachuted into the home affairs ministry in 2009. As soon as she arrived she claimed credit for the fruit of years of painstaking reform — and plenty of credulous journalists believed her. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.