The Minister of Higher Education, Buti Manamela, assured Parliament that while officials in his department were attending “study group” sessions organised by the African National Congress (ANC), these were legitimate and above-board engagements and that doing so was in keeping with guidance from the Public Service Commission (PSC).

Manamela was responding to a parliamentary question posed by Dr Delmaine Christians of the Democratic Alliance.

ANC study groups are specialised internal party structures designed to support the party’s public representatives in conducting oversight, formulating policy, and preparing for legislative committee meetings. Generally, for each parliamentary committee there will be a parallel ANC study group.

Manamela said that officials of his department “may attend authorised engagements involving the executive authority where their attendance is required for the limited purpose of providing factual, technical, or administrative information on matters falling within the department’s mandate.”

Department officials, he continued, were indeed attending such party-political engagements, mentioning as an example briefing such gatherings on the state of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. He shrugged off any knowledge of the details of study group participation, saying that as the department did not convene them, it kept no records of attendance.

This minister’s response avoided the key issue. Media reports earlier in the year exposed the fact that public servants in several departments had been attending meetings convened by these study groups to provide information that was not being provided to non-ANC parliamentarians, and in some instances, to provide them with information that would be damaging to ministers coming from parties other than the ANC.

This was thus not a matter of simply providing technical input.

This was a blatant contravention of South Africa’s constitutional and legislative strictures regarding the professional and non-partisan conduct of the public service. It also amounted to an attempt to undermine legitimate political principles, and indeed the Government of National Unity.

The PSC responded with an advisory note in June that took a dim view of these meetings. The head of the PSC, Prof Somadoda Fikeni, said that these engagements were “found to weaken the ability of Parliament to scrutinise executive action and shield the executive from accountability”.

The PSC had told Parliament that it is permissible for public servants to interact with political parties, but such meetings should be formally authorised and properly documented, with officials’ roles and the purpose of their participation clearly established. Departments should apply constitutional and procedural checks and keep records to ensure transparency, accountability, and effective oversight.

The minister’s response demonstrates a disregard for this advice.

The inability of South Africa’s public service to fulfil its proper administrative and “developmental” role is now universally acknowledged, and the country is now officially engaged in a process of “professionalising” it.

One element of this, recognised and specially addressed in official documents, is inappropriate party-political influence on the public service. The latter is a direct consequence of legislation that has given politicians extensive de facto influence on the appointments and careers of public servants, as well as the ANC’s avowed programme of political capture of the state through so-called “cadre deployment”, where ANC activists were placed by a party committee in positions of authority in the state and society.

Cadre deployment has been found by court judgement and by the report of the Zondo Commission to be illegal and unconstitutional, and a prime driver behind “state capture”.

Despite the professionalisation agenda and the indictments of the Zondo Commission, the ANC had stated that it has no intention of disavowing cadre deployment.

This remains an ongoing hindrance to public service reform, constitutional compliance, and the functioning of coalition governments.