Affirmative action and state capacity in a democratic South Africa

Does affirmative action breed poor state capacity?

By: Edigheji, O
Published by: Centre for Policy Studies, 2007
Via: Eldis

Is the emigration of whites, corruption and the low degree of state capacity a result of affirmative action (AA) in South Africa? This paper suggests that critics of AA wrongly attribute most of the problems experienced by the democratic state to AA. By doing so, they ignore the multiple factors that constrain the capacity of the state to provide efficient services to citizens. Such as:

• high turnover rate of senior public officials (including blacks)
• an education system has not been restructured to provide the knowledge and skills too enable citizens to be active agents of social change
• global competition for skilled workers has drawn skilled South Africans to the North.

Rather than eliminating AA, authors suggest the following policy recommendations to address the issues inhibiting high state capacity:

• transform the higher education system to enable it to produce the personnel required to run the public service efficiently
• specify a minimum timeframe for which a public servant can serve in one job before moving to another one, in order to eliminate the problem of job-hopping in the public sector
• remove the current stigma of the public service as incompetent and corrupt
• increase the number and levels of scholarships for blacks, women and people with disabilities.

(http://www.cps.org.za/cps%20pdf/pia20_4.pdf)