Vinothan Naidoo

The politics of anti-corruption enforcement in South Africa

The criminalisation of corruption recognises that the misuse of official office for private gain exacts a detrimental and distorting effect on a countrys social and economic development. This is especially acute in countries undergoing rapid political system transitions. In an effort to combat corruption, governments have come under increasing pressure to enhance the monitoring and oversight of public institutions through stringent intra and inter-institutional checks. In South Africa, the evidence clearly shows that concrete and incremental steps have been introduced since the countrys democratic transition to regulate malfeasance in the public sector through heightened monitoring, prevention, investigation and prosecution measures. Despite these measures, intra and inter-institutional analysis of anti-corruption enforcement indicates that the integrity of this approach, informed by principle-agent accountability arrangements, can be compromised or side-lined by collective action efforts that undermine the effectiveness of anti-corruption mechanisms. This reflects a politicisation of anti-corruption enforcement.

Government responses to street homelessness in South Africa

This paper reviews government responses intended to assist the street homeless in South Africa. The paper demonstrates that in South Africa the legislation and policy responses to the problem of street homelessness have been to a great extent shaped by the broader circumstances of a larger population living in informal housing, with whom the street homeless share intimate ties through social instability and economic poverty. This context has resulted in an intersectoral legislative and policy framework shaped mainly by two sectors – Social Welfare and Housing – that has prioritised various preventive measures to reduce the structural, social and economic risks and vulnerability of becoming homeless on the street. Given its nature, this framework has been and continues to be highly dependent on effective collaboration and coordination between government departments.

The challenges of policy coordination at a programme level: Why joining-up is hard to do

This article examines obstacles to policy coordination to promote development at a programme level. Contemporary efforts to promote coordination or ‘joined-up’ working across government entities highlight attempts to promote policy synergy and resource maximisation for achieving objectives that straddle the sector-specific boundaries of multiple departments. This paper assessed efforts to coordinate the actions of multiple departments towards achieving a single cross-cutting policy objective. Programme-level analysis of the Expanded Public Works Programme in South Africa revealed various reasons why joining-up is difficult to negotiate in practice. This consisted of policy goal and operational incompatibility between specialised entities, which appears sensitive to the specificity and stringency of policy goals and implementation regimens; as well as a host of difficulties related to how coordination is formally defined and designated. This included role definition and confusion, as well as the nature and locus of coordination mandates across and within individual departments.

The Provincial Government Reform Process in South Africa: Policy Discretion and Developmental Relevance

The aim of this paper is to examine the veracity of the assertion that provincial governments in South Africa possess a relatively unclear developmental role, contributing to questions about their relevance and continued existence. This paper argues that such a claim is at best uninformed and at worst potentially disingenuous in view of how the distribution of policy-making authority in South Africas intergovernmental system has functioned in practice, and the discretion afforded to provincial governments in the implementation of development policies in particular. Empirical data from an intergovernmentally implemented development programme examined as part of the authors doctoral research has been employed to illustrate this argument.

Implementing the National Development Plan? Lessons from Co-ordinating Grand Economic Policies in South Africa

Abstract The formulation of grand economic policy strategies to promote growth, job creation, and industrial development has been a regular feature in South Africas democratic transformation. The National Development Plan (NDP) is the latest in a line of such strategies dating back to the Reconstruction and Development Programme in 1994. While the creation of these strategies at various points in the countrys transition has been indicative of the states commitment to economic progress, implementing this commitment has been severely tested by the locus of authority, cohesion among and capacity of state institutions. In this paper, we critically examine the institutional arrangements behind the implementation of grand economic policy strategies in South Africa, observe how these produced variable implementation effectiveness across these initiatives, and consider the lessons for the implementation of the NDP. We will specifically focus on how ‘co-ordination’ was configured through the institutional arrangements, and look at how this shaped implementation.

The Governance of Basic Education in the Eastern Cape

The Eastern Cape province experienced extensive governmental re-organisation following South Africa’s 1994 democratic transition. This entailed significant structural consolidation in the provincial government, and the integration of a disparate set of political and administrative actors under the stewardship of the African National Congress (ANC). This process has had a profound effect on the province’s capacity to shape and implement policy, especially in institutionally fragmented sectors such as basic education. Employing the political settlements framework to characterise the province’s governance transformation, we describe how historical patterns of clientelism were transplanted into a post-apartheid political and administrative settlement, resulting in considerable intra-party cleavages amongst the political elite and impeding the growth of a rule-compliant, insulated and performance-driven bureaucracy. This has been particularly acute in the education sector, which has seen chronic leadership instability, politicisation and financial mismanagement, and which has compromised the cohesion and integrity of provincial school oversight and policy management.