Fikeni to Madlanga Commission: SA a "cemetery of policies

Professor Somadoda Fikeni, chairperson of the Public Service Commission, told the Madlanga Commission that South Africa has become a “cemetery of policies”, some of the best in the world, but not implemented. His testimony placed a long-standing governance failure squarely before an accountability forum: constant changes in political leadership and heads of departments, intentional delays, and a revolving door that prevents any leader from staying long enough to see a plan through.

The observation confirms what analysts have argued for years. In May 2022, Dr Claire Botha, a health economist and policy analyst specialising in public sector policy, health financing and resource allocation, wrote about the country’s well-populated policy graveyard, the place where well-written policies go to die. The core argument was that South Africa is simultaneously policy rich and implementation poor. The problem is not a shortage of ideas, frameworks or white papers; it is that the ideas rarely make it off the page. A fuller treatment of that argument, published at https://www.spotlightnsp.co.za/2026/10/02/the-policy-graveyard-revisited-why-better-systems-cant-save-us-from-ourselves/, revisits the thesis four years on and asks why the state keeps planting new policies in soil where they have never taken root.

The accountability question Fikeni’s metaphor invites is uncomfortable. If the country has known for decades that its policies die on the vine, why do successive administrations keep believing that the next reform, the next restructuring, the next piece of legislation or the next “governance solution” will be the one that finally works? The answer, on Botha’s reading, is that the problem is not the system but the people operating it.

The evidence she marshals comes largely from the state’s own institutions. A study of leadership in the North West Province’s public healthcare system found that performance management was “compliance-driven rather than developmental”, which “discourages innovation and accountability”. Managers deferred decisions to provincial headquarters, producing what researchers called an “authority vacuum”. The system was not failing because it lacked rules; it was failing because the people inside it had learned that following the rules was not the same as doing the work.

The most striking institutional data point concerns suspended officials. According to the Public Service Commission, in May 2026 there were 674 officials suspended across national and provincial government, with more than 500 suspended for longer than the legally prescribed 90-day period. South Africa spends approximately R800 million every year paying public servants who are sitting at home. One deputy director in the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities reportedly received more than R5 million after being suspended in 2018 and was later found guilty of financial misconduct. The rules exist, the timelines exist and the disciplinary processes exist; what is missing is the will to use them. As the EFF’s statement on the matter put it, what exists today is “not a disciplinary system but an organised mechanism of protecting politically connected bureaucrats”.

This is where the governance lens sharpens the argument. The standard remedy for implementation failure is to convert policy into law, on the theory that binding obligations create enforceable duties. Botha made that argument herself in 2022 but now concedes its limits: a law that is not enforced is just a policy with better formatting. South Africa does not lack laws; it has some of the most progressive legislation in the world on paper. What it lacks, she argues, is the institutional capacity and human will to enforce them. Fikeni himself noted that political decisions and constant leadership changes have blocked implementation, including through intentional delays.

The deeper problem, on this account, lies in a set of human frailties that policy circles rarely name: weak work ethic, the absence of shame when work is not done, the taking of credit for others’ labour, and the simple question of whether officials show up at all. A law requiring disciplinary processes to conclude within 90 days means little if those running them are politically compromised or protected by patronage networks. An anti-corruption body with sweeping powers becomes another instrument of protection if its leaders are chosen for loyalty rather than integrity.

By contrast, Botha is careful to note the exceptions: many public servants, often in under-resourced departments and with little recognition, do their work quietly and well, and some, like the overextended nurse or clinic manager, would gladly bring policy to life but lack the staff, supplies and backing to do so. Their diligence, she writes, is the exception the system fails to protect rather than the standard it demands.

Her conclusion is a warning to those who hold power. New policies, new laws and new reforms can be added indefinitely, but until the human frailties that undermine every system are confronted, the cemetery will keep growing. The weakest link is not the architecture; it is the people, and no system, however elegant, can save the state from itself. Whether the Madlanga Commission’s findings will force that confrontation remains the open question.