Whither the State? Corruption, Institutions and State-Building in South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, the relationship between class formation and the post-Apartheid State is proving valuable in the study of the performance of public-sector organisations, the study of the political elite and service delivery protests. In these cases, the focus is on struggles over who can get hold of the instruments and resources of the state and use them for their own purposes. Such an analysis proceeds too quickly in South Africa. The difficulty lies not with the idea of class formation or with the notion of political society; it lies with the understanding of the state. The state is conceived as if it were a formed entity, an object that is either captured or that works efficiently. This paper focuses on the state itself. It considers how talking and acting on corruption invoke mutually exclusive conceptions about the state, such that the ‘struggle against corruption’ is also a political struggle about the form of the state.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Sarah Meny-Gibert and Tracy van der Heijden from the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) for their assistance in thinking through some of these ideas. The paper also benefitted from the discussion at the PARI—Princeton symposium on ‘International Comparative Perspectives on Corruption’, hosted at the University of the Witwatersrand on the 6–7 August 2012. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of this paper; I received valuable and detailed suggestions and calls for clarification.

Notes

There are other notions of the state at work in South Africa, including ones that appeal to participatory democracy, yet they are weakly embedded in political practice today.

Mbaku's own position is that ultimately African institutions are badly designed because they fail to prevent public servants from using public resources for their own private interests.

For all its apparent ubiquity in the twentieth century, corruption rose to prominence on the international policy agenda only in the late twentieth century. In 1996, the World Bank, then under the leadership of James Wolfensohn, put the issue firmly on the agenda as part of a broader focus on ‘good governance’ (see Doig and Theobold, 2000, p. 1). Hodgson and Jiang (2007) attribute the conflation of corruption with the public sector to the hold of libertarian and individualistic political ideologies that see state as a restraint on individual freedom. In other words, they see the focus on corruption from the 1990s as the handmaiden of a liberal politics of rolling back the state. ‘From this individualistic and libertarian perspective […] the solution to the problem of corruption [is] the reduction of the State’ (2007, p. 1047). Was this not the intention of structural adjustment exercises undertaken by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in many African countries in the 1980s?

See the debate between Raz (1986) and Kymlicka (1989) and Galston (1991).

In 1976, at its 22nd Congress, the French Communist Party formally declared the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat inapplicable in the conditions of Western Europe. See Etienne (1977).

It is not so much the critique of capitalism that Marxists have foregone, but rather their claims about the historical role of the working class. If no particular class can claim to represent the universal, then a state that works in favour of any particular groups is simply partisan, hence corrupt because it mistakes private interests for those of society as a whole.

See McLennan and FitzGerald (1991).

Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi was the Minister of Public Service and Administration at the time. She writes in her Masters dissertation, written when she was in office: ‘the minimalist, neo-liberal ideology of NPM [New Public Management] clashed with the democratic and radical approaches of the ANC especially with regard to the '‘macro’ sides of reform’. ‘But such an appreciation,’ she continued, ‘could not detract from the potential these tools offered to result in greater efficiencies in state administration’ (Fraser-Moleketi, 14).

The introduction of New Public Management principles in the organisation of the public service in the late 1990s was driven by concerns with ‘efficiency’ and ‘innovation’.

Hyslop (2005) and Lodge (2002) have also written on political corruption in South Africa, drawing links between state reconstruction with party political interests.

In the State, Transformation and Property Relations, Apartheid is deemed to have prevented Blacks from benefitting from capitalism such that capitalism developed in a ‘skewed’ manner. The more traditional argument was that capitalist development was a condition (in a transcendental sense) of Apartheid itself.

I have discussed elsewhere how this measure of who was an ‘appropriate’ beneficiary was allied to a politics of Black authenticity. See Chipkin (2007).

See the distinction between contradiction and antagonism in Laclau and Mouffe (1985).

This is true provided that public servants declare their interests and that there is no conflict of interest. The Public Service Commission found recently, however, that public servants often declared their interests that revealed a conflict of interest, but proceeded anyway (see PSC, 2012).

I am reminded here of the discussion in The Civilizing Process of Norbert Elias's discussion of the German bourgeoisie. With no hope of entry into the aristocracy, the German bourgeoisie, unlike the French, defined a culture of their own, in contradistinction to the Juncker class, emphasising honesty, frankness and technology. See Norbert (1969).

In the Mass Democratic Movement of the 1980s and 1990s there was an often stinging critique of ‘white’ and/or ‘bourgeois’ living and an explicit rejection of its norms. This is why suburbs like Yeoville in Johannesburg, for example, developed an iconic status. It was not simply that its racial mixity offered a preview of what non-racialism after Apartheid might look like. No less important was that its residents often explicitly rejected ‘white’ norms—sometimes expressed as a rejection of middle-class values (about family, about sexuality, about consumption), sometimes as a rejection of racism and racialism, sometimes as a combination of both.

See also Jeremy Cronin's presentation ‘Some reflections on the systemic underpinnings of corruption in contemporary South Africa’, a presentation at the PARI-Princeton symposium on ‘Institutionalising Government. Comparative, International Perspectives on Corruption’, Public Affairs Research Institute, 6–7 August 2012. The paper is available at http://www.pari.org.za

I have protected the identity of this official by referring to her as ‘BS’.

I am drawing here from interviews conducted for the following study: Public Affairs Research Institute (2011).

Failure to adhere to administrative rules and regulations has certainly been exacerbated by the NPM-inspired focus on management. Yet administrative systems and processes were also severely compromised in the 1980s with the introduction of the National Security Management System. Moreover, the rationalisation of the public service after 1994 saw a further weakening of already weakened administrative processes. Lodge (2002) discusses this process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivor Chipkin

Public Affairs Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.