Nationalism, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State: The South African Case

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article undertakes a concrete analysis of the workings of the post-apartheid South African state bureaucracy, within the state hospitals and provincial health departments, in an effort to understand the reasons for its poor functioning. The research points to a contradictory set of rationales shaping the workings of the bureaucracy, which may be ascribed to the tensions identified within the nationalist project by Partha Chatterjee. The article discusses six key features of the post-apartheid bureaucracy: class formation, ambivalence towards skill, the importance of ‘face’, hierarchy, ambivalence towards authority, and budgetary rituals. It argues that these constitute a set of informal rationales shaped by the imperative to undo racism and white domination in the state and in the society more broadly, and that they tend to work against and erode the Weberian rationales for a meritocratic and effective state bureaucracy. There is a tension at the heart of the nationalist project, between the aspiration to construct a ‘modern’ state and the drive to assert African sovereignty through dismantling white domination. There is little chance of establishing a developmental state (for which the hallmark is effective bureaucracy) in South Africa unless nationalism can be reshaped to define meeting the needs of the people as the central strategy for overcoming the legacy of apartheid.