Transitional Politics and Machinery of Government Change in South Africa

The ‘machinery’ of government reveals a great deal about how the state’s organisational apparatus is arranged to give effect to its policy commitments. It is a process influenced by more than structural logics and is inextricably bound up in the politics of change and the prerogatives of political leadership. This article traces the changing composition, size and number of national government departments in South Africa. It considers the drivers of machinery change by reviewing the muted effect of public sector reform and the more significant impact of political drivers following the country’s transition to democracy. The article shows that the trajectory of machinery change has been expansionary in general and, in more recent times, driven mainly by organisational fragmentation. This was initially prompted by an expanded agenda of policy demands, yet substantively shaped by political interests within the African National Congress under the transitional presidency of Nelson Mandela. Organisational change under the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma presidencies has been more sensitive to the incumbents’ need to project policy and political control through the state machinery. However, this generated markedly different outcomes in the organisational composition of national departments, with Zuma’s presidency overseeing a significant shake-up and acute increase in the national machinery and a pronounced deployment of these institutions to serve clientelist motives.