ROB ROSE: Cadre deployment: the heart of SA’s darkness

Were President Cyril Ramaphosa at all serious about fixing the country — its interminable blackouts, its runaway crime, delinquent cops and feral municipalities — he would have used last week’s state of the nation address to announce an abrupt end to cadre deployment.

Needless to say, he did no such thing. Ramaphosa is, ultimately, an apparatchik of the ANC first, South Africa’s president second: to ditch cadre deployment would have been to cut off the party’s entitlement to nepotistic appointments, an endowment stemming from its considerable role in liberating the country.

In the end it may have no choice as the noose tightens around this treacherous practice.

On February 2, Joburg high court judge Willem Wepener ruled that the ANC must hand over all records relating to cadre deployment between 2013 and 2021 to the DA’s Leon Schreiber, under the Promotion of Access to Information Act.

Wepener agreed that as an MP, Schreiber “has a duty of oversight over appointments to organs of state”, and that that duty is “best served with full knowledge of all the factors that go into the decisions to appoint individuals”.

What no doubt swayed him was the alarming evidence given by the ANC’s own officials to Raymond Zondo’s state capture commission.

National chair Gwede Mantashe, for example, testified that “comrades, once deployed, are expected to work on behalf of the [ANC] movement in the public service and parastatals”.

As Wepener pointed out, this sort of thing could “detract from the objectivity of the person so employed, who had to ‘work’ on behalf of the ANC”.

But it was the testimony of Barbara Hogan, the former minister of public enterprises, that was perhaps most devastating to the ANC. She told Zondo that party structures “saw it as their right to instruct a minister who should be appointed and not appointed”, something she considered an “abuse of power”.

Hogan said the effect is that a “handful of people” can decide on the hiring of “a huge number of people” in government.

Strangely, the ANC didn’t seem to expect Wepener’s ruling. So on February 8, it asked for leave to appeal, arguing that “the ANC is a private party, and information belonging to the ANC is not for the asking”.

And it stuck to its line that it “does not appoint anyone to the public service” but “recommends” people who are “fit for purpose” to apply. 

Which, of course, few reasonable people will believe, after Hogan’s revelations. Still, in the context of South Africa’s problems, it’s hard to overstate the importance of this case.

Prince Mashele, an independent political analyst and author of The Fall of the ANC, believes cadre deployment lies at the heart of the country’s morass.

“In the early 1990s, many of us would have excused cadre deployment, given that it was a transition from the apartheid regime to a new democratic order,” he tells the FM. “But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear it’s been a huge liability to South Africa, as the party staffed the state and strategic enterprises like Eskom with incompetent cadres.”

It’s absolutely clear, says Mashele, that if you want to fix the state and the economy, cadre deployment must be sacrificed first.

But left to its own devices, the ANC will never jettison the practice, he says. “The ANC is a manager of patronage — it wants to placate its agents through offering these positions, and it knows if it removes these cadres throughout government, it becomes difficult to keep the ANC in power.”

Schreiber agrees, telling the FM that you can’t expect to have a capable state when people are being deployed to government based not on their skills but on their proximity to the ruling party. “We know from the Zondo commission that in just a three-year period, the ANC’s national cadre deployment committee influenced appointments in 85 different government departments,” he says.

It’s frightening to imagine how pernicious the impact could be when you consider there are nine provincial cadre deployment committees, and regional ones too. “If these committees are influencing appointments to public bodies, the public has a right to see it,” says Schreiber.

The legitimate arguments in favour of cadre deployment are also wafer thin. Certainly, transformation isn’t one of them.

In 2019, the department of public service & administration recorded that 81.2% of civil servants were black, 8.7% were coloured, 7.4% were white, and 2.2% were “Asian”, adding: “It is thus evident that the employment equity targets have successfully been met when it comes to race.”

The ANC’s other argument is that cadre deployment is simply the party exercising “freedom of speech” in telling the government which candidates it prefers. But this argument also falls flat when it becomes a fait accompli that these “recommendations”, effectively, become public policy.

This isn’t just a DA concern. ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba says cadre deployment “has been used to reward ANC loyalists at the expense of service delivery”. And he points to the police specifically.

In Our Poisoned Land, the inestimable investigative journalist Jacques Pauw ruthlessly exposed how, over two decades, a succession of mediocre people have been appointed to head the police. “If you’re an incompetent CEO, you’re not going to appoint competent people — you’re going to appoint people, at most, on your level,” he said.

Ultimately, Mashele says the ANC will lose this battle, partly because even its most loyal supporters are now drawing a direct link between the incompetents appointed to key positions at places such as Eskom and the fact that they don’t have power in their homes.

“My prediction is that the ANC won’t win the election outright in 2024 — and this will be entirely related to its policy of cadre deployment,” he says.