TERENCE CORRIGAN: The potholed road from Johannesburg to Washington - Business Day
Terence Corrigan
Echoing sentiments the city’s residents would share, President Cyril Ramaphosa recently bemoaned the state of Johannesburg. Unsurprisingly, it took a meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) foreign ministers to bring this to his consciousness.
After all, SA’s government has long had a preoccupation with its outsize place on the global stage, and the embarrassment of the decay across its wealthiest urban centre hardly inspires confidence in this role.
The meeting itself proved difficult, with the US effectively boycotting it and geopolitical divisions among those who attended. To cap it all, the US subsequently expelled the SA ambassador in Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, after he made some unconscionably ill-judged public comments about his host country and its president.
These came after bellicose remarks about SA by US President Donald Trump, signifying a sharp downturn in relations. Rasool was supposedly working on mending them, though listening to his comments it’s hard to imagine how.
The year 2025, which promised SA’s government one of those moments in the international limelight it craves, is not going well. Our foreign affairs are garnering rare public attention for all the wrong reasons, with the country’s external projection threatening very real domestic consequences.
A country’s foreign and domestic performances are invariably linked, and this is the underappreciated case in SA. The potholed roads, burst water pipes and rancid garbage strewn about in Johannesburg that cast a pall over the G20, and the diplomatic breakdown in Washington, are not just coincidentally related but arise from precisely the same set of impulses.
Thirty years ago SA’s transition required reorienting its entire system of governance, from the most pedestrian offices to the most elevated, from the roads department of the smallest dorp to the suites of the country’s most crucial diplomatic missions. Not only were these all now required to operate according to the new ethos, but the remit of their responsibilities was substantially expanded.
The problem was that the process of reorientation lost touch with the imperatives of governance. Outside a few pockets of the state — such as the Treasury and the Reserve Bank — politics, rather than administration, has been the operative principle. As one-time ANC MP Maria Rantho put it, “it is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants”. She went on to be appointed to the Public Service Commission and her counsel was in effect followed.
It’s fair to say that much of what ails the governance system is now not only political favouritism and garden variety incompetence, but the criminal suborning of institutions.
The overall descriptor of this was (and remains) “transformation”, though one should understand this correctly. Yes, demography would be a defining feature, but so was political loyalty and obeisance, particularly at the upper levels. As a seminal exposition, the ANC’s “The State and Social Transformation” in 1998, proclaimed: “Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the [National Liberation Movement — the ANC] over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.”
Thus, municipalities offered stable, well-paid positions for local leaders and their circles of influence — not to mention access to tender opportunities. Foreign embassies provided comfortable, high-status berths for the more prominent: wonderful sinecures for people with pedigree, regardless of their aptitude for diplomacy. Plus, embassies were far enough removed from the country to serve as useful holding pens for those whose continued domestic presence was inconvenient.
Taken together, the outcomes were predictable. Expertise, qualifications and experience were of secondary importance. The ability to enforce meaningful accountability was never properly developed. Inevitably, outcomes failed to meet their mandates, and over time the capacity to do so — as Johannesburg illustrates now — declined.
On top of this, the weakened state has been penetrated by criminal groups, for which crooked but connected public servants are useful conduits for extraction. It’s fair to say that much of what ails the governance system is now not only political favouritism and garden variety incompetence, but the criminal suborning of institutions.
State offices have become the prime currency of political patronage. The National Planning Commission — whose now largely ignored National Development Plan was sharply critical of state administration, from local government to the foreign service — had this to say in a 2020 report: “Staff at all levels of the government bureaucracy should have the authority, experience, competence and support needed to do their jobs.
“A significant challenge and contradiction that goes against [SA’s aspiration to be identified as a developmental state] is the rejection of meritocracy in the public service. Persons are appointed to jobs in state-owned entities and the public service without the requisite experience, skills or gravitas as a result of inappropriate political involvement in selection and performance management.”
The state of Johannesburg and the conduct of an ambassador have followed the same potholed road, functioning within their own perverse logic. In Johannesburg, a deskilled and poorly managed city has at least remained within the control of the ANC, and the patronage systems it enables.
As if on cue, the president’s complaints about the city were followed by reports of fraud to the tune of R335m in the perpetually challenged City Power — despite warnings that it was paying “deceptive invoices” — as Johannesburgers struggle to keep the lights on even as load-shedding eased up.
In Washington, Rasool was merely voicing what would in ANC circles be uncontentious, even restrained, views of the US. After all, party documents have repeatedly heaped contempt on the US for all manner of things. This was the case long before Trump took office, and is rooted in the ANC’s geopolitical worldview. But that he lacked the nous and good sense to keep these views out of the public eye speaks volumes about his temperament as an ambassador.
SA is not the only country whose government regards the US with hostility. The ANC’s commitment to the Palestinian cause, for example, is genuine; this is not an issue it would easily relinquish. However, it is in a position where its relationship with the US has enormous economic value. It is demonstrably failing to balance these competing impulses.
Certainly, there’s little indication of a strategy over the past few years to preserve the relationship in the face of the growing risk of political estrangement. Perhaps SA never bothered, not thinking that far ahead, or expecting that the country’s history would give it permanent immunity.
Less dramatically but part of the same depressing story, parliament recently heard that embassies in Asia — a fast-growing region where SA supposedly hopes to build profitable relationships — are out of money, struggling with dilapidated equipment and unable to undertake promotional activities. One mission was described as a “child-headed household”.
Meanwhile, equal in their juvenility, the ANC and its allies in the Johannesburg council seem determined to save face after coming under pressure to step back from renaming Sandton Drive “Leila Khaled Drive”, a move explicitly and expressly intended as an insult to the US. The council has now decided a “public consultation process” is a good idea after all.
This is deeply destructive playground politics with no upside for SA, but sadly a comprehensible outgrowth of choices that have been made. SA now faces the consequences of the governance choices that have been made over decades, and that have wreaked so much damage to the country’s prospects and the promise of the constitutional order. This is true whether seen from Johannesburg or from Washington.
Corrigan is projects and publications manager at the Institute of Race Relations