Description
This abstract tell the turnaround strategy from below public sector reform among south african home affairs.
Arbeitspapiere / Working Papers
Nr. 109
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, Colin Hoag and Darshan Vigneswaran
The Turnaround Strategy from below: public sector reform among
South African Home Affairs migration officials in Johannesburg
2009
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien
Department of Anthropology and African Studies
The Working Papers are edited by
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität,
Forum 6, D-55099 Mainz, Germany.
Tel. +49-6131-3923720; Email: [email protected]; http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de
http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/workingpapers/Arbeitspapiere.html
Geschäftsführende Herausgeberin/ Managing Editor:
Eva Spies ([email protected])
Abstract
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the state and political reform in devel-
oping countries. It is specifically concerned with the issue of ‘institutional culture’ and the
manner in which it promotes or prevents uniform practices and consistency of purpose in
bureaucratic agencies. We explore this central dynamic in the context of post-Apartheid
South African administrative reform, and more particularly the public management of migra-
tion within the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and a recent attempt at reforming it, the
Turnaround Strategy (TS). The paper tries to assess whether successive layers of adminis-
trative culture can, at some stage, coalesce into one single, more unified set of perceptions
and practices prone to improving service delivery and what the necessary mechanisms for
such a change are. In other words, how can we transform the perceptions and practices of
public officials?
Compared to other developing countries in Africa and to the rest of the South African public
service, structural factors are not prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in reform-
ing the DHA. It is not to say for instance that major understaffing and poor training are not
significant factors, but rather to see them as the results of limited commitment from man-
agement to change and improvement. Borrowing from Grindle’s analytical framework (1997),
the paper argues that if some intentions of the TS and of previous transformation initiatives
did address some of the core problems (such as recruitment and performance expectations),
these however missed out on one crucial dimension – the creation of a shared sense of mis-
sion – and did not perceive the problematic managerial style dominating the institution. In
doing so it increased most officials’ sense of institutional instability and antagonism with the
public, two points which prevent the learning processes which have actually taken place from
spreading beyond certain individuals and certain sections of the Department.
The authors
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti
Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (UR201) / Forced Migration Studies Pro-
gramme, University of the Witwatersrand, [email protected]
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in African Studies
majoring (political science) from the Centre of African Studies (CEAN – Bordeaux). Her
thesis was devoted to the transformation of South African immigration policy in the post-
apartheid period. Her research interests are public policy, immigration policy analysis,
regional policy coherence and local migration dynamics. Research Director of the French
Institute in South Africa between 2004 and 2008, she was then appointed Senior Research
Fellow with the Institute of Research for Development (IRD-www.ird.fr) in September 2008.
Based at the Forced Migration Studies Research Programme, she currently coordinates
jointly with Loren Landau a two-year research programme on Mobility and the Governance of
Urban Space: Policy Formation and Social Reconfiguration in African Cities.
Darshan Vigneswaran
University of the Witwatersrand, Forced Migration Studies Programme,
[email protected]
Darshan Vigneswaran coordinates the Immigration Enforcement and the State in Africa
initiative, co-coordinates an EU-funded Network of Excellence in Qualitative Research with
partners in the UK, Ghana and Accra, edits the Migration Methods and Field Notes Series
and coordinates a two-year study entitled International Policing, Mobility and Crime in South
Africa, funded by the Open Society Foundation. He completed his doctorate, entitled The
Contours of Control: A Study of European Territoriality at Monash University in 2005. In 2008
he was a British Academy Fellow at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford,
where he serves as the Reviews Editor on the Working Paper Series. In 2009 he was
appointed Associate Researcher at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and
Emancipation, University of Hull, where he co-coordinates a research and training workshop
series on Migration and Forced Labour in Southern Africa.
Colin Hoag
University of California at Santa Cruz, [email protected]
Colin Hoag holds an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg. His thesis examined the role of street-level bureaucrats in the effectuation of
immigration policy at the South African Department of Home Affairs, and considered factors
informing the actions and attitudes of those bureaucrats. His research interests include
political anthropology, urban studies, migration, and space. In 2009, Colin began working
toward his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
1
P
a
g
e
1
The Turnaround Strategy from below: public sector reform among
South African Home Affairs migration officials in Johannesburg
1
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, Colin Hoag and Darshan Vigneswaran
Introduction
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the state and political reform in developing
countries. We are specifically concerned with the issue of ‘institutional culture’
2
Given the history of state formation in Africa, subject to several competing and conflicting traditions
of public service culture, fragmentation rather than unity seems to dominate African state
bureaucracies.
and the manner in
which it promotes or prevents uniform practices and consistency of purpose in bureaucratic
agencies. We explore this central dynamic in the context of post-Apartheid South African
administrative reform, and more particularly the public management of migration within the
Department of Home Affairs. The paper tries to assess whether successive layers of administrative
culture can, at some stage, coalesce into one single, more unified set of perceptions and practices
prone to improving service delivery and what the necessary mechanisms for such a change are. In
other words, how can we transform the perceptions and practices of public officials?
3
Fragmentation has been specifically identified in work on South Africa’s post-
Apartheid public service (Picard, 2005; McLennan, 2008). A corollary question is whether civil service
reforms, which have been numerous in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s (Darbon, 2003; Kamekou,
2008) can transform the manner in which government delivers services or whether these efforts are
mostly symbolic (not to say cosmetic) in nature. The paper will seek to identify the specific structural
and contextual obstacles that determine the success of reform initiatives. Counter-intuitively, the
paper also explores Darbon’s contention that reforms can be a source of destabilisation and further
fragmentation (2003: 7), which is rarely acknowledged in the design or analysis of public sector
management policies (2003: 15).
Paper rationale
The paper finds its justification in mostly four points. First, although the South African State is often
misleadingly conceived as one of the most institutionalised on the continent,
4
1
Paper prepared for Panel 20: States, public bureaucracies and civil servants: Organisational fields and actors'
practices, European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), Leipzig, 6 June 2009.
its specific forms of
2
Our analytical framework here is largely based on the work of Merilee S. Grindle (1997) who defines
organisational cultures as “a shared set of norms and behavioural expectations characterising a corporate
identity” (1997: 482). We shall come back to this when discussing the paper’s conceptual and empirical
framework.
3
The literature on such fragmentation and general collapse of African public administrations is abundant. See
in particular Lindauer & Nunberg, 1994; Wunsch & Olowu, 1990; Zartman, 1995; Farazmand (ed), 1991;
Dwivedi & Henderson (eds.), 1990; Dwivedi & Nef, 1982; Darbon, 2002; Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2002.
4
Dominique Darbon for instance in “Réformer ou reformer les administrations projetées des Afriques? Entre
routine anti-politique et ingénierie politique contextuelle » (2003: 1) excludes South Africa, Zimbabwe and
Botswana from his analysis.
2
P
a
g
e
2
institutionalisation, if well known under Apartheid (Posel, 1991), have remained largely
understudied since (Vigneswaran, 2008b, 2009). Second, with the advent of democracy and the
broad transformation of State institutions into integrated, national and inclusive entities, the South
African public administration has purportedly entered a new era, based on principles of equity and
meritocracy (Marais in Bayat & Meyer, 1994; Schwella in Wessels & Pauw, 1999; Picard, 2005;
McLennan, 2008). While South Africa has adopted these policies, as part of New Public Management
(NPM) paradigm (Cloete, 1986; Marais in Bayat & Meyer, 1994), public administration has been
reformed in a rather autonomous way (Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Cloete & Mokgoro, 1995).
5
Unlike
many other African countries, South Africa’s adoption of NPM did not depend heavily on the
compulsion of international financial institutions and donors (Kamekou, 2008). The paper hopes to
enlarge this long overdue rediscovery of the impact of public administration reform in post-colonial
contexts (Bezes, 2007) by looking at a specific case study in South Africa. Third, our efforts to
understand the complexities of this topic benefit from our focus on the Department of Home Affairs
(DHA). Both the structure and culture of this Department are deeply rooted in an Apartheid-era
administrative tradition. Yet, the DHA has been tasked with the imposing challenge of receiving,
regulating and expelling South Africa’s newest population: migrants from abroad. By testing and
teasing out the manner in which senior and ordinary officials within this Department have sought to
resolve this transformation dilemma, we are able to open out a range of less commonly observed
dimensions of institutional and organizational change.
6
Last, while migration policy in South Africa
has so far been envisaged mostly from the perspectives of public policy transformation (Wa Kabwe-
Segatti & Landau, 2008), discrimination against migrants in access to services (Greenberg & Polzer,
2008) and urban development (Landau, 2006), very little attention has been paid to understanding
policy implementation from the perspective of civil servants themselves (except for Davids for
Southern African Migration Project, 2005). Indeed, looking beyond South Africa, the international
literature on immigration policy has been critiqued for its “lack of attention to the sphere of
implementation” (Ellerman, 2005). This is a gap we are intending to fill here for we are convinced it
can reveal entirely new dimensions (such as the instability of the administration and representation
processes among civil servants informing the daily implementation of migration policy) and in
particular produce forms of regulation and statecraft that bear little relationship to policy-makers’
designs. Following Blundo & De Sardan (2007), we do believe it also enables us to get away from the
kind of normative approaches that prevail in the analysis of dysfunctional policy implementation,
particularly regarding the public administration of minorities and foreigners, a growing if still
neglected research field (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2003).
Object
The case which this paper uses to explore these questions is the implementation of a supposedly in-
depth reform policy, entitled the Turnaround Strategy (TS), within the South African Department of
Home Affairs (DHA). This policy was initiated in 2007 by senior officials in the DHA to profoundly
5
It is beyond the scope of this paper to give an overview of South African public sector reform since the
demise of Apartheid. For such an overview, see McLennan, 2008.
6
Again, it is beyond the scope of this paper to summarise that changing situation. It has been regularly and
extensively documented in Crush & McDonald, 2000; Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau, 2008; Landau & Wa Kabwe-
Segatti, 2009.
3
P
a
g
e
3
transform the Department’s organisational management and output results and was over one year
into its implementation at the time of writing. This policy initiative, although not the first of its kind
in the DHA, offers the possibility of observing public administration reform in one of the most
criticised sectors of the South African public service, fifteen years after the end of Apartheid.
Methods
The type of organizational cultural and cognitive processes we are specifically interested in here are
likely to go unnoticed if studied mostly from official documents and interviews with top civil servants
and policy decision-makers. For these reasons, the research on which this paper is based mostly
relied on socio-anthropological work of a qualitative nature carried out at Home Affairs offices
(Harrison & Market Streets, Crown Mines) in and around the City of Johannesburg between April of
2008 and January of 2009
7
7
This research was funded jointly by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French
Institute of South Africa, and the Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand. The
ethnographic survey at Home Affairs offices was carried out by Colin Hoag under the supervision of Aurelia Wa
Kabwe-Segatti and Darshan Vigneswaran, as part of his Honour’s and Masters’ degrees. The authors would like
to thank the Department of Home Affairs for authorising access to its premises and staff and more specifically
the following persons: Antoinette van den Berghe, Harrison Street Office; Johann Heenen, Market Street
Office; and Florencia Belvedere, Crown Mines Refugee Reception Office.
representing hundreds of hours of work and extensive transcripts. The
authorisations to conduct work at Home Affairs were obtained by the Forced Migration Studies
Programme several months before the research began. The proposal for access was extremely
broad, covering many DHA offices and border posts seeking permission to enter and remain on
premises and to speak to and record conversations with officials of various ranks. The approval was
only granted after a long period of negotiations, involving the Deputy Minister for Home Affairs, Mr
Malusi Gigaba and a range of other officials. As with our previous negotiations with the DHA, it is
extremely difficult to attribute either the months of delay or the eventual approval to any one factor
or shift. What is clear is that the approval rarely entailed prompt and direct access in practice. The
approval helped us develop contacts at each office but on each occasion we also had to negotiate
with Heads of Offices. In exchange, we provided extensive feedback in the form of reports to each
office where extensive research was conducted. Overall and in contrast to some of FMSP’s other
more obviously rights-oriented forms of research, such as our survey at the Lindela Repatriation
Centre,, relations with Home Affairs officials were very friendly throughout this study. Participant
observation and open-ended interviews were conducted at the Permanent & Temporary Residence
Permits sections, at the Inspectorate and at a Refugee Reception Office in order to cover the variety
of tasks performed by Home Affairs civil servants working within the Immigration Directorate of
Home Affairs. Our choice of Directorate was clearly influenced by our initial interest in migration
issues and also the impossibility, given the size of the team, to work in all sections of the
Department. While this constitutes a clear bias to our work, it was also our belief that the
Immigration Directorate, because dealing with non-nationals, constituted a very special vantage
point. Most studies of public administrations in Africa have so far dealt with services in charge of the
national population. We do think, as others have argued elsewhere (Lochak, 1985), that observing
how state officials behave with non-nationals in general and non-nationals with limited rights such
as undocumented migrants or asylum seekers and refugees, is particularly revealing of the
4
P
a
g
e
4
characteristics (in terms of equity, legality, transparency) of the existing public service ethos and
coexisting normative systems. In addition to this, the paper also draws from research conducted as
part of the Public Access to Information Act project (FMSP, South African Historical Archives,
University of the Witwatersrand) and from previous interviews with government officials (Wa
Kabwe-Segatti, 2003; Vigneswaran in Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau, 2008).
Outline
Our analysis begins with a discussion of existing literature on public administration and
organizational culture in post-colonial contexts and of their pertinence for South Africa. The paper
then unfolds in two directions: it first explains the TS “from above”, through its initial diagnosis and
mandate, and contrasts that with how officials on the ground have come to understand and
implement it. In doing so, we show how the NPM paradigm inspired aspects of the reform and
emphasise the gap between the stated political objectives of the TS and its reception and
understanding by civil servants. In the second part of the paper, we outline the main difficulties
involved in creating a more unified and efficient immigration management system. There, we
distinguish between, on one hand, the role played by structural factors, in particular in terms of
understaffing, budget constraints, salary levels and migration dynamics, and on the other, the
impact of the reform itself in shaping civil servants’ prevalent perceptions of an erratic and aloof top
administration and a threatening, irrational public they nonetheless have to serve. The paper
concludes that structural factors, compared to other developing countries in Africa and to the rest of
the South African public service, are not prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in
implementing the reform. Borrowing from Grindle’s analytical framework (1997), it argues that if
some intentions of the TS and of previous transformation initiatives did address some of the core
problems (such as recruitment and performance expectations), these however missed out one
crucial dimension—the creation of a shared sense of mission—and did not perceive the problematic
managerial style dominating the institution. In doing so it increased most officials’ sense of
institutional instability and antagonism with the public, two points which prevent the learning
processes which have actually taken place from spreading beyond certain individuals and certain
sections of the Department.
Reforming public administration in post-colonial contexts: of South Africa and of Home Affairs
South Africa shares with the rest of the continent many of the features of a history of administrative
development characterised by its colonial and post-colonial moments. However, this being said,
major differences set it apart from most other African countries, the most significant of which being
the anteriority of its adoption of Western-style government methods, the degree of
institutionalisation of administrative rules across its territory and administrations and a relatively
ancient if heterogeneous professionalisation of its corps of civil servants (Picard, 2005; Schütte et al.,
1995). Another major difference, but of importance in terms of the spread and nature of dominant
paradigms in the public service, is South Africa’s only very recent decolonisation and subsequent
transformation of its public service (from 1990 onwards) (McLennan, 2008) and, therefore, its
relative autonomy, by African standards at least, in shaping a type of public administration
5
P
a
g
e
5
corresponding to its specific endogenous development needs (McLennan op.cit.: 4–5). South Africa’s
first post-Apartheid-wide consultation known as the Mount Grace Consultation was organised by the
New Public Administration Initiative (NPAI) formed in 1991. McLennan thus summarises the
paradigm shift that emerged from the initiative launched by academics and activists recently
returned from exile and close to the African National Congress (ANC):
They explicitly rejected the generic process model and attempted to move towards a more
appropriate model relevant to the South African context. Key elements of the resolution
noted that the theory and practice of public administration was too descriptive, reductionist
and reifying and lacked analytical technique. In addition to recommending a more
developmental and responsive approach, the resolution called for “more rigorous scientific
analysis, explanation and predication of governmental and administrative phenomena
supplementing their mere description...”
8
As Darbon notes in a paper devoted to public service reform in Africa, the reform wave set out by
international organisations as from the mid-1980s, mostly of neoliberal inspiration, resulted in an
ultra-technicisation of administrations centred around budget rationalisation and management
methods. This emphasis largely depoliticised reflections around public services’ role and actual
capacity in development projects (Darbon, op.cit.: 3–5; see also Ferguson, 1990 and Jobert, 2002).
As opposed to most other African situations where this trend was highly problematic because it
relied on developmentalist and externalised understandings of change, disconnected from the social
dynamics that create the necessary conditions for reform’s ownership by elites and civil servants
(Darbon, op.cit.: 9), the Mount Grace Consultation in South Africa identified that pitfall and
attempted to address it through specific options suited to the South African context.
(Mc Lennan, op.cit.: 4)
However, despite that clear identification of a need to move away from a dominant generic
approach to public administration, one that was convenient to ignore the political and socio-
economic conditions created by the Apartheid government’s policies, the post-Apartheid choices in
public sector reform have had a mixed record. As McLennan notes, this first diagnosis intended to
repoliticise public sector reform was then followed by a moment of pragmatism during which the
technical and productivity emphases of the NPM were very appealing to public services confronted
with the realities of service delivery constraints and public pressure:
Over the first five years of democratic government, there was a shift from a more open and
engaged practice of public administration to a more regulated and bureaucratic style as the
realities of implementation and fiscal constraints became evident. This was evident in a
growing emphasis on the decentralisation of responsibility, performance contracts and
professionalism. The approach adopted was underpinned by an assumption that professional
behaviour combined with rational management techniques would improve service delivery.
(Op.cit.: 10)
Some of these reforms were successful. A well known such success story in the post-Apartheid
transformation of the public sector has been that of the South African Revenue Service (SARS); the
worst failure perhaps that of the Department of Home Affairs. In 2007, Chris Tapscott, dean of
economics and management of the University of the Western Cape, could thus describe Home
Affairs as “the most extreme example of a department that hasn’t properly transformed – it still
embodies the culture of the Apartheid era.” (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, 2007) The question that
8
Fitzgerald & McLennan, 1992: 23.
6
P
a
g
e
6
arises therefore is why have some parts of the South African public administration “made it” and
others not? Why in particular has the DHA resisted so consistently over a period of fifteen years
attempts at transforming it into an efficient and modernised pillar of government action both in
terms of population registration and immigration management?
In order to explain these problems, we turn to the literature on institutionalism. According to Hall
and Taylor, an institution can be defined as the “formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and
conventions embedded in the organisational structure of the polity or political economy”. One of
this literature’s main concerns has been the evolution and transformation of states, and particularly
questions of convergence and difference in organizational form. More specifically, institutionalists
are interested in why states have almost universally adopted a certain category of institutions
(sovereignty, diplomacy, separation of powers etc) while maintaining enduring differences in other
areas (democracy/authoritarianism, laissez-faire capitalism/socialism, multi-culturalism/
homogeneity, etc). The principal—sometimes favoured—explanatory model that institutionalists use
to deal with these issues is that of ‘path dependence’, the principle:
that once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high.
There will be other choice points, but the entrenchments of certain institutional
arrangements obstruct an easy reversal of the initial choice. (Levi, 1997: p. 28)
There are different ways in which institutionalists use the concept of path dependence and various
ways of differentiating between the models. But for our purposes it is perhaps worth distinguishing
between utilitarian and cultural versions. For utilitarians, the objective is to explain why states do
not always adopt the most efficient sets of institutions. They focus on the resources and energy that
states vest in particular institutions and the resource energy required to change them, which
sometimes means, somewhat counter-intuitively, that less efficient institutions constitute the
economically rational choice. Some commonly used examples, albeit not from the field of state
development is that of the selection of the technologically inferior VHS over BETA as the video-
recorder model of choice or the persistence of variation in electrical plugs. In both cases a different
set of technologies would be more efficient over the long term, but now that the choices have been
made, economic rationality dictates that the inferior technologies remain. Cultural institutionalists
use a different logic to explain why institutional change is difficult. Here, the focus is on institutions
as frameworks of meaning instead of simply rules and procedures and persistence and variation are
explained by the fact: that many of the conventions associated with social institution cannot readily
be the explicit objects of individual choice. Instead, as the elemental components from which
collective action is constructed, some institutions are so ‘conventional’ or taken-for-granted that
they escape direct scrutiny and, as collective constructions, cannot readily be transformed. (Hall &
Taylor, 1996: 940).
A good example of this style of argument has been developed by John Ruggie (1993) about the
institution of sovereignty. For Ruggie, territorial sovereignty is so deeply entrenched in the way in
which modern scholars have conceptualised that they have a hard time conceiving of the possibility
that it might change or how a different political system could be fashioned. This is despite the fact,
as Ruggie points out, that if we look back to the medieval period, the political map in Europe looked
entirely different, such that a system of politics that revolved around autonomous, individuated and
bounded political entities would have seemed entirely bizarre.
7
P
a
g
e
7
Recently, Merilee Grindle has sought to apply a similar approach to the analysis of public
organisations in various developing countries (1997). Grindle shows that the second wave of public
sector reforms implemented in the 1990s, following structural adjustment plans, was mainly focused
on instrumental logics: improving salary levels and downsizing public administrations. It however did
not lead to major productivity gains (op.cit.: 481), a myth long perpetuated as part of the
Washington consensus (Gore, 2000). Wondering about how, in those varied adversarial contexts,
some public organisations still manage to perform relatively well, Grindle and her team identify four
key cultural logics—albeit using a quantitative analysis—of public organisations in a range of
developing countries. Those dimensions are: a sense of mission or mystique, performance-oriented
expectations, managerial style and autonomy in recruitment (op.cit.: 488). While not dismissing
altogether structural elements such as salary levels and client demand, Grindle’s argument is that
those were not objective and significant explanatory factors of performance differences in the public
sectors considered. Elements identified as significant on the other hand pertain to what Grindle calls
“organizational cultures”, an alternative already used by others in the analysis of public
organisations (Lipsky, DiIulio). As opposed to industrialised countries, approaches to the
understanding of public organisations’ poor performance in developing countries have mostly relied
on structural adversarial factors: patronage as the basis for recruitment; dependence on donors’
intervention; very limited fiscal basis; low salaries; poor infrastructures and heavily centralised
decision-making systems. Grindle’s argument, however, is that those do not fully explain why some
public organisations still manage to perform well under those conditions and create spaces of
relative autonomy. Her argument is that organisational cultures are more fertile grounds to identify
significant differentiating factors and help to explain the “capacity of public sector organizations to
perform concrete tasks assigned to them by governments, not only by investigating the structures,
activities and human resources of these organizations, but also by understanding the constraints of
their performance set by a series of contextual factors” (op.cit.: 483). This echoes Maurice
Engueleguele’s warning that poor public sector performance in developing countries should not
systematically be equated with an overall decline in state sovereignty understood classically in the
Weberian sense, as the monopoly over legitimate sources of violence (Engueleguele 2008).
This dimension is important here as a number of analysts of the South African context have pointed
to the limited or even sometimes weakening sovereignty of the South African State in the post-
Apartheid period (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2008; Landau, 2006; Monson, 2009). These authors show that by
implementing policies which encourage fragmentation rather than inclusion (as in housing or in
migration management), and by turning a blind eye to widespread human rights abuses and the
development of parallel norms of “mob justice”, the South African government runs the risk of
undermining its own endeavour to set up a more inclusive, people-centred polity. These analyses,
however, rarely distinguish, as Engueleguele recommends and as Grindle does, between
government’s retention of its overall coercive power (for instance, in terms of territorial and
mobility control or in the overall coordination of public intervention) and its actual capacity in terms
of policy formulation and implementation. This distinction between coercion and oversight on one
hand and capacity to deliver on the other will be particularly useful here in identifying and
characterising the limitations of the DHA’s attempt at reforming itself. Extending on the ideas put
forward by cultural institutionalists and Grindle, in this article we not only look at culture as a static
entity, undermining efforts at reform, but at how institutional cultures can themselves by anti-
reformist in nature. This approach to culture therefore differs from purely anthropological ones,
8
P
a
g
e
8
which often stress the relationality, multiplicity, and negotiated character of culture.
9
In order to prepare the way for this argument, it is useful to briefly review the structural and
institutional context of migration management in the late Apartheid and post-Apartheid periods.
Historically in charge of civic affairs (birth, death, marriage registration) and therefore central to the
formal recognition of citizens by the State, the DHA was also in charge (under different names and
with several organisational patterns) of controlling both South Africans’ and foreigners’ mobility into
and within the territory under Apartheid. In the post-Apartheid period, the DHA has remained in
charge of both mandates (registration and mobility control) yet in a totally different political and
legal context as well as a rapidly changing regional migration regime (Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau,
2008). As Darshan Vigneswaran has shown, under Apartheid, the mobility management was
administered by numerous departments of state (Foreign Affairs, Internal (Home) Affairs,
Cooperation and Development, Police, Defence, Justice, Community Development, Trade and
Industry, Agriculture, Minerals and Energy and Transport):
Instead, we
focus in a specific, narrower sense on the ideological capacity of culture to organise, limit or coerce
the perceptions of those individuals acting “within” it.
There was clearly much room within this broad framework for confusion of roles,
misappropriation of responsibilities and manipulation of authority. The key divide lay between
‘discriminating’ Departments and ‘enforcing’ Departments. Whereas Cooperation and
Development and Internal/Interior Affairs (later to become Home Affairs) shared
responsibility for documenting the population, defining areas of legitimate movement, and
communicating these decisions, it ultimately fell to the police and (to a lesser extent) the army
to back up these decisions with force. This had two important implications. First, it meant that
the discriminating departments could make decisions about what sorts of movement were
legitimate, without adequately considering the strategic implications of such decisions for
those responsible for enforcement. Second, it meant that police and army officials possessed
considerable discretion to determine what aspects of Apartheid became a reality, through the
selective use and application of a broad enforcement mandate. (Vigneswaran, 2009: 9)
This is in an important aspect, which shows the genealogy of internal divides and disconnections
within the Department in terms of policy making and implementation and the already considerable
degree of discretion granted to lower level officials—at that time, police officers—in translating
migration policy into acts.
In the post-Apartheid period, the DHA’s incapacity to perform its mandate was enough to earn it the
nickname “Horror Affairs” by the Daily Sun newspaper.
10
In 2003, one of its former Director
Generals, Barry Gilder, even called the Department’s service delivery “a joke”.
11
9
See Fischer, 2007 for a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of culture in the anthropological
tradition.
The transition itself,
10
On one occasion, it has actually led to a hostage situation, when a South African man used a toy gun to
leverage the life of a DHA official against the issuance of his identity document, some six years in the
processing (http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-09-dept-of-home-affairs-criticised-at-toygun-case, accessed
on July 9, 2008).
11
“SA immigration service ‘a joke’” November 2, 2003. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3247767.stm,
accessed on June 17, 2008.)
9
P
a
g
e
9
between 1994 and 2004, was a chaotic period, wrought with rivalries between the ANC and the
Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which was accorded responsibility for the DHA as part of the power-
sharing process in the Government of National Unity. The appointment of the controversial
Mangosuthu Buthelezi (IFP leader) as the first Minister of Home Affairs also hampered South Africa’s
movement toward a more inclusive immigration practice. In particular, the first ten years of post-
Apartheid government, were not enough to see efficient legal and policy reforms within the
Department. Buthelezi and his team, caught in various fights with the ANC majority, did not manage
to alter significantly and progressively a legal and policy frame that was inherited from the late
Apartheid era. Despite the progressive new South African Constitution of 1996, the Immigration Act
of 2002 was nearly ten years in the making, meaning that up until that point, the Department was
functioning under the terms of Apartheid-era legislation. The Aliens Control Act of 1991 — also
known as “Apartheid’s last act” — was framed mostly around concerns over security and policing
and has resulted in a lingering preoccupation of all sections of the Immigration Directorate with such
matters (Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau 2008: 35, 60–61). Also, several key elements of the Aliens
Control Act were deemed in contradiction with the 1993 Interim Constitution and the Constitution
of 1996, meaning that it was made unconstitutional almost immediately after being enacted, leaving
a legal void in its place until the 2002 Immigration Act came into force in 2003 (Wa Kabwe-Segatti in
Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau, 2008: 84).
Beyond this problematic and stalled legal and policy situation, the daily practice of migration
management has also been regularly controversial and, in some instances, sanctioned by
Government’s internal control structures. These dysfunctional management practices will be briefly
envisaged here focusing on three aspects: inconsistencies in temporary and permanent residence
permits leading to litigation cases; parliamentary monitoring of the DHA’s budgetary
mismanagement and finally, rampant corruption. Several inconsistencies in decisions rendered by
the Immigrants Selection Board between 1994 and the early 2000s regularly led to court cases which
not only discredited the DHA’s legal team but also spent out its litigation budget usually by the
beginning of the fiscal year.
12
The development of policy is severely hampered by a lack of accurate and comprehensive
data … Labour shortages are thus determined in a rather ad hoc manner. It is vitally important
for the development of a coherent labour migration policy that current methods of data
collection be reviewed, expanded and updated. (1996)
Cases had to do with protests from migrants’ rights NGOs, firms,
foreign embassies or even the South African Department of Trade and Industry against refusals of
permits to highly skilled professionals or unlawful arrests, detention and deportation procedures.
The Labour Market Commission in June 1996 thus commented:
Gerry Eisenberg, immigration advocate, pinpointed the actual root causes of the numerous instances
of dysfunctional practices in the following statement to the Financial Mail in April 1999:
the real problem facing South Africa’s efforts to streamline its immigration policy is not the
legal framework but the administrative breakdown of the department. Give us any rules you
12
For a detailed record of such inconsistencies, see the systematic investigation of journalist Marion Edmunds,
« Home Affairs frustrates would-be immigrants », The Mail & Guardian, 29/03/1996; Marion Edmunds, « The
secret men who decide if immigrants may stay », The Mail & Guardian, 07-13/06/1996; Marion Edmunds,
« Skilled immigrants rejected by Home Affairs », The Mail & Guardian, 12/04/1996.
10
P
a
g
e
1
0
like, but run your department efficiently. […] The department operates in a crippled fashion
and is one of the few with absolutely no credibility. Financial Mail, « A Department coming
apart at the seams », 16/04/1999.
The current situation is one in which mismanagement, corruption, poor productivity and little
political strategic vision have led to discrediting the new asylum system and turning into an unofficial
economic immigration process while the official immigration system still does not perform
satisfactorily in terms of importing the necessary skills into the country (Wa Kabwe-Segatti &
Landau, 2008).
According to then Minister Buthelezi, the DHA was one of the poorest Government departments in
terms of budget allocation. Addressing the Parliamentary Portfolio Commission on Home Affairs in
May 2001, he described a particularly concerning financial situation leading to, among other things,
a moratorium on job creation explaining widespread understaffing and the non-replacement of
infrastructure at border posts. This statement was reiterated regularly and even backed by
opposition MPs at the time. However, a report published in the same period by Auditor-General
Shauket Fakie gave a somewhat different picture of budget allocation and management at the
Department. Among other things, the report concluded to the illegal spending of over 19 million
Rand [1.9 million Euros] as well as to a controversial management of migration control. In particular,
the spending of 4.2 million Rand [420 000 Euros] on deportation that year (well below current
deportation costs though) was denounced along with the illegal functioning of the Market Street
office in Johannesburg and the poor collection of fines imposed on airlines for bringing in
undocumented migrants. The Fakie report was followed in 2001 by the publication of another
report, this time by the Public Service Commission (PSC), which unequivocally concluded to the
DHA’s major management issues:
The PSC said the Department had all the financial and human resource management policies
and procedures it needed in place but lapses in adherence to these had occurred. […] These
(lapses) are ascribed to the integrity of the individuals involved and the dubiousness which
arises when rules are perceived as hampering effective service delivery. (SAPA, 2001)
Finally, different investigations conducted since 1994 among migrants by Human rights NGOs
(Human Rights Watch, 1998 and 2001; Amnesty International, 2001; CORMSA 2007 & 2008) as well
as sometimes internally, by the DHA itself, have uncovered widespread and persisting corruption at
all levels of the administration.
13
13
The following publications offer systematic investigation on the issue of corruption among HA services:
Antoine Bouillon, Les « Amagongogo », Immigrants africains francophones en Afrique du Sud, Johannesburg,
GDR 846, CNRS, Programme de recherches sur les Migrations, Institut Français d'Afrique du Sud, septembre
1996, p.43-44 ; Jonathan Crush, (Dir.), 1998, Beyond Control: Immigration and Human Rights in a Democratic
South Africa, Cape Town: IDASA; Queens: SAMP, p.152-156 ; Human Rights Watch, 1998,“Prohibited Persons”.
Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees in South Africa, New York, Human Rights
Watch, p. 55-60, 111-113 ; Jonathan Crush& Vincent Williams, (Dir.), 1999, The New South Africans?
Immigration Amnesties and their Aftermaths, Cape Town: IDASA; Queens: SAMP, p.49 ; South African Human
Rights Commission, 1999, Report Into the Arrest and Detention of Suspected Undocumented Migrants,
Parktown, Johannesburg, p. 24-26.
The DHA’s institutional and strategic response to these accusations
has been extremely slow despite numerous arrests throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 1998, an
Anti-Corruption Unit was finally set up and constituted of officers from the police and the National
11
P
a
g
e
1
1
Intelligence Agency. Under the direct authority of the DHA’s Director-General, it received 225 cases
during its first year of existence and contributed to the indictment of 69 people. Since then, on
average one hundred cases are uncovered every year, which is likely to be only the tip of the
iceberg. Corruption remains rife throughout immigration services and “prices” for services (from
renewal of temporary permit to asylum application, marriage certificates and airport “passage”) are
regularly updated in NGOs reports (see CORMSA, 2008).
It is against that backdrop of dysfunctional management of a public sector that what was to be
called the Turnaround Strategy would emerge. We shall now turn to its genealogy and design and
confront it with its perception by officials on the ground as revealed in the ethnographic work
conducted in the Johannesburg immigration branch of Home Affairs offices in 2008.
The Turnaround Strategy from above: New Public Management with a hint of organizational
culture
Genesis
Initiated by Minister Mapisa-Nqakula in 2004 as she had just arrived in office following Mangosuthu
Buthelezi’s departure from Government after the 2004 elections, the strategy was however only
officially launched in 2007. At that time, it was presented in the words of the minister as “a
comprehensive long-term programme for the rebuilding of a new and different Home Affairs”
(Mapisa-Nqakula, 2008a) in order to “[put] in place fundamental changes in the culture and
organisation of Home Affairs and the way we do our business” (Mapisa-Nqakula, 2008b: 5).
Interestingly, the setting up of what is considered as the most comprehensive reform attempt since
1994 came with the appointment of a new Director General, Mavuso Msimang, who immediately
highlighted both the leadership fragmentation and the central cultural dimension he saw as the key
challenges to that reform process:
Some people in the current leadership in the department have no appreciation of the extent
of the rot. They believe others are being too hard on them. […] A total culture change is a sine
qua non for the overhaul of the prevailing situation that has deteriorated to a point where not
fixing it would certainly be a catastrophe. (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, 2007)
Others, such as Chris Tapscott, cited before, had already insisted on that cultural dimension: “This
lack of transformation is not about race and colour—it’s about administrative practice and a
prevailing institutional culture of indolence, lethargy and arrogance” (Robinson in Mail & Guardian,
op.cit.). Sven de Kock, CEO of Fever Tree consulting, AT Kearney’s local branch, the company that
was commissioned by Home Affairs to undertake the preliminary research and design the strategic
plan of the turnaround, confirmed that a culture change in Home Affairs had to be “the driver” of
the strategy, rather than the implementation of new technology and infrastructure, which should be
“the enabler” (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, op.cit.).
The decision to base the strategy on a radical assessment of the situation requiring an “about-face”
change in direction was clearly resisted by the former Minister who declared “I feel that [it] has
12
P
a
g
e
1
2
been, somehow, improperly named, and should rather have been styled as a moving forward
strategy, for I do not see that it imposes on the Department a new direction”.
14
While it can be considered that the decision to order an in-depth management diagnosis and set up
a profound reform strategy was belated, thirteen years after the first democratic elections, it is more
accurate to consider that, as from 2004, the necessary institutional and political conditions for that
change to be envisaged seriously were in fact met for the first time. What the 2007 report also found
was that the Department had a 30% vacancy rate at middle and top management levels, rising to
40% among officials on the ground. Until today, senior posts are filled by people in an acting
capacity, which has created a climate of “instability and a lack of motivation” said Sandy Kalyan, the
Home Affairs Director-General’s spokesperson (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, op.cit.).
Minister Mapisa-
Nqakula’s decision was however taken following a new investigation by the Public Service
Commission team into the disarray at Home Affairs. This found that there was a “lack of strategic
leadership and management capacity”, with the result that the Department’s transformation agenda
was collapsing; and “a general crisis response to problems due to a lack of adequate management
plans” (2007). It was fully supported by Cabinet and Treasury, an important dimension given the
substantial budget implications of the Strategy. Although it is yet unclear how much the overall
reform will cost South Africa, the Treasury allocated the DHA R1-billion over the period 2008–2010
for the strategy. However, Mike Ramagoma, special adviser to the Home Affairs Minister said the
allocation would be used only for infrastructure upgrading. Payment of task team members and
outsourced companies will be in addition to this (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, op.cit.).
Outsourcing and ownership
As indicated, the decision was made to outsource the initial research and diagnosis to the private
sector. The Support Intervention Team (SIT) in charge of coordinating the Strategy was a hybrid of
private and public sector specialists led by Kevin Wakeford, former CEO of the South African
Chamber of Business and currently adviser to Eastern Cape Premier Nosimo Balindlela. It includes a
National Treasury task force led by Accountant General Freeman Nomvulo, an IT panel led by IT
strategist at De Beers Patrick Monyeki, communications specialists and a business re-engineering
team from Chicago-based global management consulting company AT Kearney (Robinson in Mail &
Guardian, op.cit.).
In South Africa, the company led the recovery of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) in the
late 1990s, as mentioned earlier in this paper. While this role of AT Kearney was pivotal in designing
the strategy (and it is beyond the scope of this paper to review critically its research methods, on
which there is not much public information available), the Department, and specifically the Minister
and Director-General, insisted on ensuring the overall supervision of the process and creating
channels for the strategic plan to be drafted internally and in a participatory manner at the level of
14
“Address by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, MP, Minister of Home Affairs, at the Home Affairs Annual Strategic
Planning Workshop; 4 March 2004”
(http://www.search.gov.za/info/previewDocument.jsp?dk=%2Fdata%2Fstatic%2Finfo%2Fspeeches%2F2004%
2F04030809461001.htm%40SpeechesandStatements&q=(+(+buthelezi+)+%3CIN%3E+title)&t=M+Buthelezi%3
A+Home+Affairs+Annual+Strategic+Planning+Workshop, accessed 20 July, 2008.)
13
P
a
g
e
1
3
top management. In the 2008-2011 Strategic Plan for the Department of Home Affairs, the first
comprehensive policy document ascribing the TS a central role in current and future DHA
development, that ownership dimension is systematically highlighted:
In phase one of the turnaround programme, from June to December 2007, combined teams of
specialists and DHA officials systematically developed the main elements of the model. A
governance structure was put in place to ensure that the Department had control and
responsibility for the programme, which had 140 deliverables in phase one. The Minister
chairs the Steering Committee. A Vision and Design team, sponsored by the Director-General,
was responsible for the overall design of the new model. A related and ongoing project
provided guidance on the policy and regulatory aspects, including government priorities and
programmes. (DHA, 2008: 28)
The main features of a three-year plan
Building on the core precepts of NPM and the experience accumulated by public management
reform experts, the TS thus represents a balanced design, placing organisational cultural changes at
the heart of its approach, in a broader plan that focuses primarily on increased professionalism. As
we shall see in the following section though, very little of this was directly conveyed to lower
management and staff on the ground. Even the most thoughtful dimensions, introducing elements
of immediate change in service delivery in order to boost staff morale and gain public confidence in
the process (Mavuso-Msimang, 2008 in Strategic Plan: 7), was not sufficiently advertised to be
understood at office level. The Department’s Turnaround Strategy was not accompanied by an
internal communication strategy able to keep staff updated in the Strategy’s development. Rather,
things remained at the level of top officials in Pretoria and were only disseminated in the form of the
graph below, published in the 2008-2011 Strategic Plan, a document that can be downloaded online
but that most officials on the ground hardly ever read.
14
P
a
g
e
1
4
Graph 1. Phases of the Turnaround strategy (DHA 2008: 9)
It is against that backdrop that we shall now envisage how the TS has translated on the ground in the
eyes and words of DHA officials employed in the various sections of the National Immigration Branch
(NIB), recently renamed as the Immigration Services Branch (ISB). The following two section draw
from ethnographic work conducted over several months in 2008 by Colin Hoag at various Home
Affairs offices in and around Johannesburg.
The Turnaround Strategy in the eyes of DHA officials
Most DHA officials report having come to understand the TS (or to not understand it) through
occasional addresses from the Director General (DG), through a monthly newsletter called “Ikhaya”,
or through “circulars” disseminated by Head Office. Among the many improvements understood as
planned or promised are: increases in the quantity and quality of electronic resources; the retooling
of organisational structures; the implementation of a biometrics-based database called the Home
Affairs National Identification System (HANIS) which will integrate a number of existing databases,
including those for nationals and non-nationals alike; the streamlining of ID, passport, permit or
other document processing; and office renovations.
Officials note that there are few signs of a turnaround as of yet, however one noticeable change has
been the increased emphasis on the production of statistics and other measures of accountability.
This has manifested itself differently from office to office. At the Admissions office, for example, the
Strategy seems to have had little impact. The following is a transcription of an interview with one
official who had been working with the DHA for 7 years:
15
P
a
g
e
1
5
- Do you think the Turnaround Strategy is effective?
Hey, I would say, at the moment, I haven’t seen anything. No changes, yeah. It’s only that
change within the section [the splitting of the TRP section into three sub-sections with a low-
level supervisor for each].
- Do you think that it will be successful, the Strategy?
I’m not really sure about the Strategy you are talking about. Explain it, maybe.
- Well, the DG has talked about a big Turnaround Strategy to make the Department more
efficient. So there are a number of components to it, so Batho Pele,
15
Another official from that same section asked cynically “why aren’t they turning around our
salaries?” Still another saw it only in reference to the fact that their office has been moved since
2004 from the 4
th
floor to the 2
nd
floor to the 6
th
floor (with talk of a move to the 7
th
in the near
future) as renovations continue on the office building. Each time they move, applications are lost in
the shuffle, and officials become frustrated at having to resituate their workspace and get used to
another workflow.
and some technology
changes, but-
Hmm. I’ve been hearing about the Turnaround Strategy but, in our region I haven’t seen any
change. (Personal interview 26/6/2008)
At the Inspectorate, the only recent changes noted by officials (which were only assumed to be part
of the Turnaround Strategy) were the imposition of measures which the office had no capacity to
deliver upon. The changes all had to do with accountability and production, as demonstrated
through statistics. Firstly, officials were expected to create a docket for each and every encounter
they have with a suspected undocumented non-national. On any one of the several raids that
officials conduct with the police every week, an official might encounter between 20 and 100 such
people. Even assuming officials could determine who exactly “encountered” whom, this directive is
practically meaningless given the amount of time each official would need to dedicate to docket-
creating. Additionally, the office had an insufficient amount of cabinet space to store these dockets
as it was, much less if they were to be creating the numbers they were being asked to create. The
cruel irony was that the office had been trying to access more cabinets from the Civic Affairs section
which were being stored in the floor below the Inspectorate office. From a window in their kitchen
and dining area, they could see rows upon rows of unused cabinets, but were barred from utilising
them for some unknown political reason internal to Home Affairs.
The only other change that was noticed (and not simply promised), was that the Civic Affairs section
had been given a salary increase several months ago, but because of the reported logistical difficulty
in altering the pay rates at the Head Office, Inspectorate officials were not being paid as they were
supposed to be, nor were they going to be compensated retroactively.
At the Crown Mines Refugee Reception Centre, the situation was much different. The TS there was
not something one heard of or read about, but something witnessed and experienced. The office
15
Batho Pele is another example of a public reform policy intended to place people at the centre of South
African public services and fight corruption.
16
P
a
g
e
1
6
was used as an institutional “enclave” in the sense that Anders describes, where a large amount of
resources are targeted in one direction to establish a foothold or “motor” for change (2005: 89). This
is then used as a testing ground and as a model for the reform’s export to other parts of the
organisation. At Crown Mines, the TS was not termed simply “Turnaround” by officials, as in the
other offices, but rather it was known as “the Turnaround Team”, with an accompanying “they”
pronoun. This reflects the fact that an actual group of consultants came into the office for some six
months, evaluating the situation and establishing new processes for streamlining. Most of the
changes that were implemented as a result take “production” as their focus. Every morning, the
managers of each section convene with the Centre managers for a “production meeting”, where the
quantitatively-verified performance of the previous day is discussed. Given the very substantial
numbers of asylum applicants who approach this office, the emphasis is understandably on feeding
as many asylum seekers through the office as possible and impressive processes have been
developed to achieve this end.
Nevertheless, many at the office, especially the Refugee Status Determination Officers (RSDO) who
make up almost half of it, are unhappy with the changes. They say that they were only consulted
nominally by the Turnaround Team, allegedly as an empty gesture to win their support. Most
especially, they say that the push toward production has resulted in a situation whereby “quantity is
put before quality”, meaning that RSDO’s are not given an adequate amount of time to interview,
adjudicate, and hand out decisions to asylum seekers. RSDO’s are officially allotted 180 days to make
a decision, however by setting targets of around nine applications per day, the reforms de facto allot
RSDO’s a mere 45 minutes. One RSDO who thought that 180 days would be a much more
appropriate amount of time questioned “To whom does this |sic] 180 days apply?” Despite the fact
that asylum seekers are supposed to be told of their constitutional rights, and the interview/
adjudication/ decision process, RSDO’s have only time to ask a few key questions, on which they will
base their entire decision.
Many of the employees at this office, who were carefully selected for their relatively significant
educational and professional background to help establish the trend of pervasive reform at the DHA,
indicated that they had no plans to stay too long at the Department. They were frustrated that their
legal skills (most RSDO’s have law degrees of one sort or another, and several even have their MA)
were hardly being put to use. Instead of “applying their minds” to weigh each individual case on its
merits, they essentially cut and pasted language from similar decisions that they had already written,
sometimes utilising doctored information even from different countries to support their case.
This very brief description of the TS reform measure should help not only to illustrate the current
state of the DHA’s Immigration Services Branch (ISB), but also to demonstrate the extent to which
reforms are subject to significant translation, especially when mis- or un-communicated to the lower
level implementers. It also has shown how, even in settings where substantial energy and resources
are dedicated to the implementation of reforms, there are still certain dangers involved if measures
are pushed “too far”. Over a year into its implementation, the TS reveals fault lines which had not
been anticipated by its designers. We shall now turn to what we identified as the main obstacles to
change, as well as the few conducive aspects, within the National Immigration Branch.
17
P
a
g
e
1
7
The Turnaround Strategy from below: the “magical” “mystique” of South African Home Affairs
The title of this final section proceeds from two different sets of references which we would like to
articulate here. Borrowing on Taussig’s notion of the “magic” of the State (1997), Colin Hoag, in a
recent unpublished Master’s thesis on the South African Department of Home Affairs (2009), shows
how theories of the unstable, “magical” state have been posited in order to express the sense of
vulnerability experienced by those who interact with an unpredictable state (Das, 2004). Our
intention here is to consider the perspective of Home Affairs officials—people who represent “the
state”, and who have been so consistently accused of providing unpredictable service. That is, how
do officials explain the character of the services which they deliver? Armed with officials’
perspectives regarding both their institutional environment and the public they serve, we will
subsequently reinsert ourselves into our broader analysis in terms of the necessary conditions for
institutional change to happen. What we would like to show finally is that, in an already fragmented
and rapidly transforming context, the way in which the TS has so far been introduced might have led
to exacerbate civil servants’ prevalent perceptions of an erratic and aloof top administration and a
threatening, irrational public. Despite tangible learning processes (Heclo, 2002; Hall, 1993), the
reinforcement of these perceptions is currently militating against the diffusion of those learning
processes to those more resistant enclaves in the DHA.
An aloof upper administration relying on obscure, unstable “systems”
As Anders has noted (2005) in his study of the Malawian civil service, for lower level civil servants, a
major reform initiative proposed by the World Bank did “not constitute a grand and ambitious
comprehensive plan [as it is portrayed by upper-level management], but only one aspect of their
daily lives experienced as mundane practices such as getting one’s pay-check, securing a salary
advance or leaving work to take care of a private business” (Anders, 2005: 4). This is to say that
lower-level officials are charged with executing reform measures that may not interest them very
much. Whether officials take up a project initiated at higher levels of the hierarchy is dependent
upon a number of variables, which Lipsky has documented (1980), notably including the legitimacy
conferred by officials on their manager’s policy objectives (ibid.: 18), the degrees of conflict and
reciprocity between supervisors and lower level employees (ibid.: 25), and the clarity of project
objectives (ibid.: 40).
Officials at the Johannesburg DHA offices were constantly complaining that the orders which came
from Head Office were completely out of touch with the realities on the ground. Many of the upper-
level officials in charge of disseminating these orders came to the Department from elsewhere, and
therefore did not work their way through the ranks, where they could learn what the job is “really”
like on the ground. Some officials noted feeling as though they were being used by those at the top,
for example, for the creation of statistics which will improve the manager’s image. This no doubt
complicates the delivery and reception of directives, suggesting that even sound plans could be met
with an a priori degree of scepticism. Officials reported that the relationship between their office
and Head Office were often not perfect. Some reported getting terrible customer service, and
experiencing major delays when requesting information or resources. The irony is that street-level
officials themselves are responsible for delivering on the major Departmental initiative called “Batho
Pele”, or “People First”, in their own interactions with the public.
18
P
a
g
e
1
8
Of course, socialisation which occurs within the organisation can also be counter-productive to the
Department’s stated ends. One official told me about how he was initially energised to get things
moving at the Refugee office and to meaningfully help improve the place. He told me that after
almost a year with the Department, however, he was beginning to wear out: “at Home Affairs, you
find that you push and you push to get something done, but it just doesn’t move. At the end of the
day, you start to think that you should just not try to move things so much” (field notes 20/1/2009).
Ethnographic detail can be particularly effective in documenting how “official” policy and procedure
can be commandeered. ISB officials are as much actors in such a field of practice as anyone. They of
course have their office and Departmental rules and regulations as a compass of sorts, but these are
not sufficient, given that they do not provide detailed instructions for the infinite possible cases
which can and do present themselves. For example, an undocumented non-national is to be
deported. But this rule becomes almost meaningless for Inspectorate officials when this person is a
pregnant undocumented non-national, as I discussed above. Furthermore, Section 11 (1) (b) of the
Immigration Amendment Act of 2004 states that a person applying for a visitor’s permit must
demonstrate that they have sufficient funds to remain in the country. As was noted above in the
case of Dumisani and the Dutch backpacker, this can take the form of a signed note stating as much,
or the official can demand three months of bank statements from the South African host, something
which was also witnessed. Officials must use discretionary power to determine which level of
scrutiny will be sufficient.
A threatening, irrational public
A conversation with a Refugee Status Determination Officer (RSDO) who entered the DHA in 2005
about what had changed in the Department is revealing of the kind of counter-intuitive perception
of the public that can emerge:
- What has changed in the Department?
This place used to be a Centre of Excellence. Now it is not.
- It’s not anymore?
No, definitely not.
- Oh, so it’s gotten worse you mean?
Yes! Now there is too much corruption.
- Oh really?
Yes. Well, let’s say since the beginning of this week [it has improved], but now we have the
fingerprint machines. (Field notes 19/12/2008)
The fingerprint machines to which she was referring are part of a new biometrics system which will
bar applicants who have been rejected asylum from returning to apply under a different name. This
is to say that she was not telling me that the officials are corrupt, but rather the public. Remarkably,
she used the term “corruption”, which is specifically applied by the media, human rights
organisations, and so on to the actions of officials, and applied it to the public. If we pursue this
phenomenon further, we see many instances of this perceived instability, unpredictability, even
danger of the populace. When asked about accusations in the media that DHA officials have taken
bribes to marry South African women to non-national men who want to obtain a “spousal
accompany” permit, officials roundly rejected the assertion. They said that it was rather the non-
national, paying a South African woman to marry him. Migrants appeared to have almost limitless
19
P
a
g
e
1
9
capabilities in officials’ discourse. Many Chinese have worked their connections at various levels of
the Department to obtain documents of one sort or another, and are somewhat untouchable. One
Inspectorate officer reported that before you can even drive a Chinese person to Lindela to be
deported, you will receive a phone call from someone higher up in the DHA advising you to let
her/him go. According to one RSDO, Nigerians simply avoid coming in altogether: “they have their
own ways of becoming legalised, which are only known to them” (field notes 20/1/2009). Others
from various countries allegedly employ other techniques, such as paying a South African to sign a
form stating that the immigrant is the person’s nephew.
Districts such as Hillbrow and Berea are said to be “full” of such “illegals”. According to one official,
you can find a Congolese brother and sister walking around Yeoville as a married couple, with a
fraudulent marriage certificate (in French, he notes), forged in Yeoville itself. Additionally, DHA
officials fret that South Africa is being exposed to weaknesses in outside legal regimes, or that
officials’ unfamiliarity with them is being taken advantage of. They were frustrated by the fact that
weak institutional capacity in foreign states was undermining their own systems. This “mistrust of
the populace” is pervasive at all of the offices visited, where many officials approach suspected
undocumented non-nationals as “clearly guilty until being proven innocent”.
The more general public can be elements of confusion and obfuscation, as well – that is, not only
applicants and their intermediaries. Complaints are regularly filed with the Inspectorate, by South
Africans and non-South Africans alike, as to the whereabouts of this or that company which is
employing suspected undocumented non-nationals or even where non-nationals are residing. The
Inspectorate officials must follow up on these (though there are areas such as Alexandra where
officials will not go, for fear of their safety), however they approach them with a heavy degree of
suspicion. Officials say that these complaints are always motivated by other factors than simply the
desire to punish people who break immigration laws (a fact which seems to offend some officials as
an insult to the importance of their work). Without fail, they say, there is some ulterior motive. This
may be that the complainant was either fired or denied a job by the offending company; or the
company is in competition with the complainant’s own company.
Although officials are socialised by “internal” and “external” factors which establish “the sly client”
as a dangerous object, officials themselves help create and reinforce this image, for example by
spatialising, dehumanising, criminalising, or pathogenising immigrants. Perhaps in response to the
cunning which officials appear to associate with foreignness, migrants are spatialised through a
discursive relegation to abject spaces. One prime example of this is “the Bush”. Because the Crown
Mines Refugee office building is not large enough to accommodate the high number of applicants it
receives, asylum seekers must first queue in an unused industrial lot down the street, before being
taken into the building. The area has almost no shade or protection from the elements and is said to
foster many access problems for asylum seekers who are pushed out of the queue, assaulted, or
abused by security guards who demand a bribe for good queue-positioning. By terming it “the
Bush”, officials have created a discursive space which is wild, untamed, and primitive (that is,
temporally distant). One RSDO pushed this even further, referring to it as “the jungle”, a term which
suggests the classically stereotyped “Africa” of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—one of chaos,
darkness, and danger. Immigrants are also spatialised in the sense that their “outside” status often
conjures up tropes of invasion and occupation of “the inside”. One RSDO said that if you just
approved everyone, it would be havoc in South Africa because of all the people. Use of the terms
20
P
a
g
e
2
0
“floods” and “waves” are also indications, in addition to the common notion that non-South African
men are “stealing our women”, which likens non-nationals to sexual predators, marauders, or even
sly “implanters” of foreign seed.
Migrants are also mystified through dehumanisation or objectification. An Inspectorate official told
me about how on one occasion some deportees escaped or bribed their way out of being deported,
saying that “we had sixteen dockets but only eight bodies”. That “dockets” should equal “bodies” is
significant, and hints at the “docket culture” described by Hornberger (2007), where the work of
attending to individual cases can convert actual socio-legal situations involving members of the
public into lifeless “units”, the less desirable of which can be dumped on officials as a reprimand or
initiation. People can indeed start “piling up”, as one RSDO told me in reference to time pressures in
his work. Such language conjures images of carcasses or refuse, either smouldering in a mound or
even smothering the Department. Categorisation can also be a form of dehumanisation. Here, it will
suffice to provide an evocative image from “the Bush”: The front of the queues for “newcomers” is
the curb of Milky Way Avenue. The first person in line bears a piece of cardboard with the name of
her/his country of origin haphazardly scrawled onto it (“Moraco” was one), worn around the neck
with a piece of kitchen twine. It is a pathetic and degrading act, yet nevertheless must be a prize as
well, given the fact that this is the only person who can be truly said to have a specific place in the
queue (and the first place at that), given the fact that everyone behind is subject to the pushing and
shoving that could displace the unlucky or timid asylum seeker backward.
The criminalisation of applicants is another way that officials contribute to the magicalised public.
Presumption of guilt of course does this, as do the interrogation-style interviews done at the
Inspectorate and Refugee Offices. Most notable here, however, is officials’ invocation of a Simmelian
logic, that the stranger is one who can act outside the realm of accepted behaviour by virtue of
her/his ‘outsiderness’ (Simmel 1950). Many officials from all the offices visited decry that because
the South African government does not have the fingerprints of undocumented non-nationals on
record, they can commit crimes without being traced. One RSDO thus said that one of the “weak
spots” of the Department was that the RSDO’s cannot tell if someone is here for “killing Rwandans”,
because the DHA does not have access to those databases. That is, he says, they are unable to keep
out those applying for reasons of “prosecution and not persecution”, a tag-line which he said was
taught to him at a Departmental training workshop. And finally, what might be called the
pathogenisation of migrants is also an example of officials’ role in constituting a dangerous object.
One RSDO, when asked about the challenges of his job, declared that health issues were foremost,
something mentioned by others as well. He said that they are not given enough vaccinations by the
Department, given their close contact with asylum seekers from all over the world. Oddly—though
perhaps indicative of the potential irrationality of these fears—the illness he feared contracting was
malaria. Another RSDO, when asked the same question, said that a negative aspect of his job was
that the “working conditions here are bad”. When asked what he meant, he cited his exposure to
disease.
The previous section calls for two remarks. First, these perceptions of the public as threatening and
irrational are certainly not specific to Home Affairs and can be found in other sectors of public
administration. However, they are certainly reinforced enormously by the kind of public Home
Affairs officials face and the type of legal culture that surrounds the legitimacy or illegitimacy thereof
21
P
a
g
e
2
1
of foreigners’ presence in South Africa.
16
Second, following from the previous element, these
mechanisms of reification and demonization of the public are widely shared by immigration officials
worldwide and not emblematic of some specific South African construction of the alien (see for
instance Spire, 2005). What we were interested in showing is the role they played in the specific
context of the reform. These deeply entrenched perceptions of both the surrounding institutional
context and the public emerge as so many stumbling blocks in fostering a positive sense of mission
based on the legitimacy of the leadership’s official objectives and on an adequate organizational
response. Instead, the DHA’s top-level officials are most of the time full of contempt for the lower-
level officials who see themselves caught in a web of constantly changing “systems” they struggle to
grasp and manipulate and a public whose presence in the country is in the first place illegitimate and
can therefore only be understood as a threat to South Africa’s modernisation endeavour.
Conclusion
As this paper relies only on work conducted within the Immigration Directorate of some DHA offices,
we shall refrain from generalising its conclusions to the entire Department or even less so to the rest
of South Africa’s public service. However, some modest lessons can be drawn from the analysis
conducted so far. First of all, the South African DHA and its Immigration Directorate have inherited
extremely powerful institutional legacies from the previous regime in terms of staff profile, work
ethics and organizational patterns. These legacies have been largely overlooked in the first part of
the post-Apartheid period due to the IFP/ANC rivalry occupying centre stage and a belief that only
legislative and policy reforms were necessary. The durable ineptitude of the DHA to perform
satisfactorily its migration control mandate in many respects has eventually led to the conclusion
that structural institutional reform was necessary. This occurred, however, thanks to a combination
of contextual South African and international elements. At the national level, the thrust for reform
benefitted from a change in departmental leadership which took place at a time when the
transformation of the South African public sector had already undergone a major paradigm shift:
from depoliticised scientific management under Apartheid to the NPM service delivery-oriented
paradigm. However, although the DHA leadership was clearly open and in demand for NPM
organizational methods, the originality of the South African case is that, as opposed to African
countries which have gone through these externally imposed public sector reforms, the DHA and the
SA Government retained a considerable level of direction and appreciation. Yet, despite these rather
enabling conditions for the reform plan, a closer examination of day-to-day work at DHA offices
reveals the limitations of the TS implementation so far.
Firstly, and despite the clear identification by management of cultural aspects as key to changing
practices, enormous divides between top and lower level officials continue to inform their relations.
16
As it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore fully institutional legacies, we recommend the forthcoming
chapter written by Jonathan Klaaren, “‘Anti-Citizenship and The Dark Side of the Law’,
in L. Landau (ed.) Exorcising The Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence, and Statecraft in Contemporary South
Africa (Wits University Press, 2010) (forthcoming) in which he shows how territory as a cultural product of
citizenship regulation over time in South African history has durably shaped and continues to influence
officials’ perceptions of legitimate belonging.
22
P
a
g
e
2
2
Widespread contempt at the top level for undertrained, unproductive bureaucrats still dominates
while lower level officials conceive their management as unreachable and management’s plans for
the DHA as illegible. More broadly, a sense of being lost in institutional instability prevails among
officials on the ground, perturbed by constantly changing regulations, IT systems, management
personnel and performance targets. The introduction of these as part of the TS reform has even
resulted in exacerbating this sense of underachievement. This divide between lower level officials
and management is not clearly addressed in the TS Strategic plan and does not seem to have
resonated as a key dimension during the various analytical phases that have taken place since 2007.
Secondly, the absence of a shared vision of institutional mission between the different components
of DHA staff is reinforced by representations of the public among lower level officials which
contribute in many varied ways to overemphasizing the illegitimacy and the threatening dimension
of migrants’ presence in South Africa. This not only hampers the development of “an efficient and
secure service to all [DHA] clients” (Mapisa-Nqakula, 2008b), not even to mention a “caring,
compassionate and responsive” one (DHA motto), but it is also in complete contradiction with the
current move towards “an effective management of migration [as] an imperative given [South
Africa’s] need for scarce skills and for regional development” (Msimang, 2008: 7).
Compared to other developing countries in Africa and to the rest of the South African public service,
structural factors are not prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in reforming the DHA. It
is not to say for instance that major understaffing and poor training are not significant factors, but
rather to see them as the results of limited commitment from management to change and
improvement. Borrowing from Grindle’s analytical framework (1997), the paper has argued that if
some intentions of the TS and of previous transformation initiatives did address some of the core
problems (such as recruitment and performance expectations), these however missed out on one
crucial dimension—the creation of a shared sense of mission—and did not perceive the problematic
managerial style dominating the institution. In doing so it increased most officials’ sense of
institutional instability and antagonism with the public, two points which prevent the learning
processes which have actually taken place from spreading beyond certain individuals and certain
sections of the Department. The recent change in Department leadership following the 2009
presidential elections contains elements of continuity with the Deputy-Minister and Director-
General having been renewed in their positions. However, the policy review under way should
seriously take into account that general sense of instability before considering new radical
transformation of policy and legislation.
23
P
a
g
e
2
3
References
Anders, G. 2005. Civil servants in Malawi: cultural dualism, moonlighting and corruption in the
shadow of good governance. Rotterdam: Law Faculty, Erasmus University.
Bayat, S. & I. Meyer (eds.) 1994. Public administration - concepts, theory and practice. Cape Town:
Southern Books.
Bénit-Gbaffou, C. 2008.Introduction: The place of participation in South African local democracy.
Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa - Number 66/67: i-vii.
Bezes, P. 2007. Construire des bureaucraties wébériennes à l’ère du New Public Management?
Critique internationale, Paris: Presses de Sc. Po., 35(2), 9–2X.
Blundo, G. & J.P. Olivier de Sardan. 2006. Everyday corruption and the state: citizens and public
officials in Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, London: Zed Books.
Brinkerhoff, D. & J.M. Brinkerhoff 2002. Réformes de la gouvernance et états destructurés:
problèmes et implications. Revue Internationale de Science Administrative 68 (4), December,
583-596.
Cloete, J.J.N. 1986. Introduction to Public Administration. Pretoria: Van Schaik.
Cloete, F. & J. Mokgoro (eds.) 1995. Policies for Public Service Transformation. Cape Town: Juta.
Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (et al.). 2003. Etre étranger et migrant en Afrique au 20
ème
siècle. Enjeux
identitaires et modes d’insertion, Vol. I, Paris, L’Harmattan.
CoRMSA. 2008 & 2007. Protecting refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in South Africa.
Johannesburg, Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa,
http://www.cormsa.org.za/research/cormsa-reports/
Crush, J. (Ed.) 1998. Beyond Control: Immigration and Human Rights in a Democratic South Africa,
Cape Town: Idasa; Queens: SAMP.
Crush, J. & D. McDonald (eds) 2000.Transnationalism, African immigration and new migrant spaces
in South Africa. Special Issue, Canadian Journal of African Studies 34 (1).
Crush, J. & V. Williams (Eds.) 1999. The New South Africans? Immigration Amnesties and their
Aftermaths, Cape Town: Idasa; Queens: SAMP.
Darbon, D. 2002. La culture administrative en Afriques: la construction historique des significations
du “phénomène bureaucratique”, Cadernos de estudos africanos, N° 3, Julho/Dezembro.
Darbon, D. 2003. Réformer ou reformer les administrations projetées des Afriques ? Entre routine
anti-politique et ingénierie politique contextuelle, Revue française d'administration publique,
1/2 (105-106), 135-152.
Das, V. & D. Poole (eds) 2004. Anthropology in the margins of the state. Oxford: James Currey.
Davids Y.D., K. Lefko-Everett, & V. Williams 2005. The Quality of Migration Services Delivery in South
Africa. Migration Policy Series N°41, Southern African Migration Project, Idasa, SAMP.
Department of Home Affairs. 2008. Strategic Plan 2008-2009 and 2010-2011. Pretoria, Chief
Directorate: Strategic and Executive Support Services, Office of the Director General.
Dwivedi, O.-P. & K.M. Henderson (eds) 1990. Public Administration in World Perspective. Ames, IA:
Iowa State University Press.
Dwivedi, O.-P. & J. Nef 1982. Crisis and continuities in development theory and administration.
Public Administration and Development 2, 59-77.
24
P
a
g
e
2
4
Engueleguele, M. 2008. Quelques apports de l’analyse de l’action publique à l’étude du politique en
Afrique subsaharienne », Politiques et sociétés 27(1), 3-28.
Ellerman, A. 2005. Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation: Deportation in Germany
and the United States. Comparative Political Studies 38, 1219-44
Farazmand, A. (ed.) 1991. Handbook of Comparative and Development Public Administration, New
York: Dekker.
Ferguson, J. 1990. The anti-politics machine: depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fischer, M.M.J. 2007. Culture and cultural analysis as experimental systems. Cultural Anthropology.
22(1), 1-65.
Fitzgerald, P. & A. Mc Lennan (eds) 1992. The Mount Grace papers: the new public administration
initiative and the Mount Grace consultation. Johannesburg: Wits P&DM.
Fitzgerald, P., A. McLennan, & B. Munslow (eds) 1997. Managing sustainable development in South
Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gore, C. 2000. The rise and fall of the Washington consensus as a paradigm for developing countries.
World Development 28 (5), 789-804.
Greenberg, J. & T. Polzer 2008. Migrant Access to Housing in South African Cities. Report prepared
for the Migrants Rights Monitoring Project, Forced Migration Studies Programme,
Johannesburg.
Grindle, M.S. 1997. Divergent cultures? When public organizations perform well in developing
countries. World Development 25 (4), 481-195.
Hall, P. 1993. Policy paradigms, social learning and the state. Comparative Politics 25 (3), 239-255.
Hall, P. A.,& Taylor, R. C. R. 1996. Political science and the three new institutionalisms. Political
Studies, 936-957.
Hoag, C. 2009. Seeing like a magical state: discretion, (de)stabilisation, and the development of sreet-
level systems of meaning at the South African immigration bureaucracy. M.A. Dissertation,
Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, unpublished.
Heclo, H. 2002. The spirit of public administration. Political Science and Politics 35 (4),
December, 689-694.
Hornberger, J.C. 2007. “Don’t push this constitution down my throat!” Human rights in everyday
practice: an ethnography of police transformation in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ph.D.
dissertation. Universiteit Utrecht.
Human Rights Watch 1998.“Prohibited Persons”. Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum Seekers
and Refugees in South Africa, New York, Human Rights Watch.
Jobert, B. 2002. Le mythe de la gouvernance antipolitique, Colloque AFSP Lille, 18-21 septembre, TR
n°3.
Kamekou, R. 2008. The national governance programme (2006-10) and the modernization if the
administration: Cameroon and New Public Management, International Review of
Administrative Sciences 74 (2), 217-234.
Klaaren, J. Forthcoming. ‘Anti-Citizenship and The Dark Side of the Law’, in L. Landau (ed.) Exorcising
The Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence, and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (Wits
University Press, 2010) (forthcoming).
25
P
a
g
e
2
5
Landau, L.B. 2006. Transplants and transients: idioms of belonging and dislocation in inner-city
Johannesburg. African Studies Review 49, 125-145.
Landau, L.B. & A. Wa Kabwe–Segatti 2009. Case study: South Africa. In Human Development Impacts
of Migration, Human Development Report 2009. Washington, DC: United Nations
Development Programme.
Levi, M. 1997. A model, a method, and a map: rational choice in comparative and historical analysis.
In M. I. Lichbach, & A. S. Zuckerman (Eds.), Comparative politics: Rationality, culture, and
structure. Cambridge, UK/New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Lindauer, D. & B. Nunberg (eds) 1994. Rehabilitating government: pay and employment reform in
Africa. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the individual in public services. New York:
Russell Sage.
Lochak, D. 1985. Etrangers: de quels droits? Paris: P.U.F.
Marais, D. 1994. Old and new public administration: the intellectual crisis in South African public
administration. In Public administration: concepts, theory and practice (eds) M.S. Bayat &
I.H. Meyer, 102-112. Halfway House: Southern Books.
McLennan, A. 2008. The academic/ practitioner interface in public administration in South Africa.
The early years – 1990 to 2000,
http://www.dpsa.gov.za/documents/networks/4thConversation/Background%20Paper%20
A%20Mclennan.pdf
Mapisa-Nqakula, N. 2008a. Speech, opening remarks by the Hon. N.N. Mapisa-Nqakula, on the
occasion of the presentation of the 2006/7 annual report of the Department of Home Affairs
to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee, February 12, 2008. Cape Town.
——— 2008b. Preface. In Department of Home Affairs, Strategic Plan 2008-2009 and 2010-2011,
Pretoria.
Monson, T. Making the law, breaking the law and taking the law into our own hands: xenophobia
and sovereignty in South Africa. In Exorcising the demon within: xenophobia, violence, and
statecraft in contemporary South Africa (ed) L.B. Landau (forthcoming).
Posel, D. 1991. The making of Apartheid, 1948-1961: conflict and compromise. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Picard, L.A. 2005. The state of the state: institutional transformation, capacity and political change in
South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Robinson, V. 2007. Can Home Affairs be saved? The Mail & Guardian, 28 May, 2007,
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2007-05-28-can-home-affairs-be-saved.
Ruggie, J. G. 1993. Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations. 47
International Organization, 139-174.
Schütte, L., E. Schwella, & P. FitzGerald 1995. Changing public and development management: South
African cases. Cape Town: Juta.
Schwella, E. 1999. The paradigmatic debate in South African public administration: a continuing
struggle. In Reflective public administration: views from the south (eds) J.S. Wessels & J.C.
Pauw. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Simmel, G. 1950. The stranger. In The sociology of George Simmel (trans) K.H. Wolf, 402-408. New
York: The Free Press.
26
P
a
g
e
2
6
South Africa: Commission to Investigate the Development of a Comprehensive Labour Market Policy,
1996, 1
st
edition, Pretoria. The Commission.
South Africa Human Rights Commission 1999. Report Into the Arres and Detention of Suspected
Undocumented Migrants, Parktown: Johannesburg.
South African Press Agency. 2001. UDM calls on Mbeki to fire Buthelezi. 6 April, 2001, Cape Town.
Spire, A. 2005. Etrangers à la carte, l'administration de l'immigration en France, 1945-1975. Paris:
Grasset.
Taussig, M. 1997. The magic of the state. London: Routledge.
Vigneswaran, D. 2009. Separation anxiety: the historical origins of institutionalised xenophobia. In
Exorcising the demon within: xenophobia, violence, and statecraft in contemporary South
Africa (ed) L.B. Landau (to be published).
Vigneswaran, D. 2008a. Undocumented migration: risks and myths (1998-2005). In Migration in
post-Apartheid South Africa: challenges and questions to policy-makers (eds) A. Wa Kabwe-
Segatti & L.B. Landau, 135-162. Paris, AFD, Collection Notes et Documents de l’AFD, N°38.
Vigneswaran, D. 2008b. Enduring Territoriality: South African Immigration Control, Political
Geography, 27: 783-801
Wa Kabwe-Segatti, A. 2003. The position of foreigners in the ‘new’ South Africa: reforming
immigration policy. 1986-2002. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de la Réunion, unpublished.
Wa Kabwe-Segatti, A. & L.B. Landau (eds) 2008. Migration in post-Apartheid South Africa: challenges
and questions to policy-makers. Paris, AFD, Collection Notes et Documents de l’AFD, N°38.
Wunsch, J.S. & D. Olowu (eds) 1990. The failure of the centralized state: institutions and self-
governance in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Zartman, I.W. (ed.). 1995. Collapsed states: the disintegration and restoration of legitimate
authority. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner.
List of interviews & transcripts referenced (All interviews were conducted by Colin Hoag in
confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement)
1. Interview with Admissions official, June 26, 2008.
2. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, November 14, 2008.
3. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, December 11, 2008.
4. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, December 11, 2008.
5. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, December 19, 2008.
6. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, January 15, 2009.
7. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, January 20, 2009.
8. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, February 3, 2009.
doc_768958032.pdf
This abstract tell the turnaround strategy from below public sector reform among south african home affairs.
Arbeitspapiere / Working Papers
Nr. 109
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, Colin Hoag and Darshan Vigneswaran
The Turnaround Strategy from below: public sector reform among
South African Home Affairs migration officials in Johannesburg
2009
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien
Department of Anthropology and African Studies
The Working Papers are edited by
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität,
Forum 6, D-55099 Mainz, Germany.
Tel. +49-6131-3923720; Email: [email protected]; http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de
http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/workingpapers/Arbeitspapiere.html
Geschäftsführende Herausgeberin/ Managing Editor:
Eva Spies ([email protected])
Abstract
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the state and political reform in devel-
oping countries. It is specifically concerned with the issue of ‘institutional culture’ and the
manner in which it promotes or prevents uniform practices and consistency of purpose in
bureaucratic agencies. We explore this central dynamic in the context of post-Apartheid
South African administrative reform, and more particularly the public management of migra-
tion within the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and a recent attempt at reforming it, the
Turnaround Strategy (TS). The paper tries to assess whether successive layers of adminis-
trative culture can, at some stage, coalesce into one single, more unified set of perceptions
and practices prone to improving service delivery and what the necessary mechanisms for
such a change are. In other words, how can we transform the perceptions and practices of
public officials?
Compared to other developing countries in Africa and to the rest of the South African public
service, structural factors are not prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in reform-
ing the DHA. It is not to say for instance that major understaffing and poor training are not
significant factors, but rather to see them as the results of limited commitment from man-
agement to change and improvement. Borrowing from Grindle’s analytical framework (1997),
the paper argues that if some intentions of the TS and of previous transformation initiatives
did address some of the core problems (such as recruitment and performance expectations),
these however missed out on one crucial dimension – the creation of a shared sense of mis-
sion – and did not perceive the problematic managerial style dominating the institution. In
doing so it increased most officials’ sense of institutional instability and antagonism with the
public, two points which prevent the learning processes which have actually taken place from
spreading beyond certain individuals and certain sections of the Department.
The authors
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti
Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (UR201) / Forced Migration Studies Pro-
gramme, University of the Witwatersrand, [email protected]
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti holds a PhD in Political Science and an MA in African Studies
majoring (political science) from the Centre of African Studies (CEAN – Bordeaux). Her
thesis was devoted to the transformation of South African immigration policy in the post-
apartheid period. Her research interests are public policy, immigration policy analysis,
regional policy coherence and local migration dynamics. Research Director of the French
Institute in South Africa between 2004 and 2008, she was then appointed Senior Research
Fellow with the Institute of Research for Development (IRD-www.ird.fr) in September 2008.
Based at the Forced Migration Studies Research Programme, she currently coordinates
jointly with Loren Landau a two-year research programme on Mobility and the Governance of
Urban Space: Policy Formation and Social Reconfiguration in African Cities.
Darshan Vigneswaran
University of the Witwatersrand, Forced Migration Studies Programme,
[email protected]
Darshan Vigneswaran coordinates the Immigration Enforcement and the State in Africa
initiative, co-coordinates an EU-funded Network of Excellence in Qualitative Research with
partners in the UK, Ghana and Accra, edits the Migration Methods and Field Notes Series
and coordinates a two-year study entitled International Policing, Mobility and Crime in South
Africa, funded by the Open Society Foundation. He completed his doctorate, entitled The
Contours of Control: A Study of European Territoriality at Monash University in 2005. In 2008
he was a British Academy Fellow at the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford,
where he serves as the Reviews Editor on the Working Paper Series. In 2009 he was
appointed Associate Researcher at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and
Emancipation, University of Hull, where he co-coordinates a research and training workshop
series on Migration and Forced Labour in Southern Africa.
Colin Hoag
University of California at Santa Cruz, [email protected]
Colin Hoag holds an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg. His thesis examined the role of street-level bureaucrats in the effectuation of
immigration policy at the South African Department of Home Affairs, and considered factors
informing the actions and attitudes of those bureaucrats. His research interests include
political anthropology, urban studies, migration, and space. In 2009, Colin began working
toward his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
1
P
a
g
e
1
The Turnaround Strategy from below: public sector reform among
South African Home Affairs migration officials in Johannesburg
1
Aurelia Wa Kabwe-Segatti, Colin Hoag and Darshan Vigneswaran
Introduction
This paper is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the state and political reform in developing
countries. We are specifically concerned with the issue of ‘institutional culture’
2
Given the history of state formation in Africa, subject to several competing and conflicting traditions
of public service culture, fragmentation rather than unity seems to dominate African state
bureaucracies.
and the manner in
which it promotes or prevents uniform practices and consistency of purpose in bureaucratic
agencies. We explore this central dynamic in the context of post-Apartheid South African
administrative reform, and more particularly the public management of migration within the
Department of Home Affairs. The paper tries to assess whether successive layers of administrative
culture can, at some stage, coalesce into one single, more unified set of perceptions and practices
prone to improving service delivery and what the necessary mechanisms for such a change are. In
other words, how can we transform the perceptions and practices of public officials?
3
Fragmentation has been specifically identified in work on South Africa’s post-
Apartheid public service (Picard, 2005; McLennan, 2008). A corollary question is whether civil service
reforms, which have been numerous in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s (Darbon, 2003; Kamekou,
2008) can transform the manner in which government delivers services or whether these efforts are
mostly symbolic (not to say cosmetic) in nature. The paper will seek to identify the specific structural
and contextual obstacles that determine the success of reform initiatives. Counter-intuitively, the
paper also explores Darbon’s contention that reforms can be a source of destabilisation and further
fragmentation (2003: 7), which is rarely acknowledged in the design or analysis of public sector
management policies (2003: 15).
Paper rationale
The paper finds its justification in mostly four points. First, although the South African State is often
misleadingly conceived as one of the most institutionalised on the continent,
4
1
Paper prepared for Panel 20: States, public bureaucracies and civil servants: Organisational fields and actors'
practices, European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), Leipzig, 6 June 2009.
its specific forms of
2
Our analytical framework here is largely based on the work of Merilee S. Grindle (1997) who defines
organisational cultures as “a shared set of norms and behavioural expectations characterising a corporate
identity” (1997: 482). We shall come back to this when discussing the paper’s conceptual and empirical
framework.
3
The literature on such fragmentation and general collapse of African public administrations is abundant. See
in particular Lindauer & Nunberg, 1994; Wunsch & Olowu, 1990; Zartman, 1995; Farazmand (ed), 1991;
Dwivedi & Henderson (eds.), 1990; Dwivedi & Nef, 1982; Darbon, 2002; Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2002.
4
Dominique Darbon for instance in “Réformer ou reformer les administrations projetées des Afriques? Entre
routine anti-politique et ingénierie politique contextuelle » (2003: 1) excludes South Africa, Zimbabwe and
Botswana from his analysis.
2
P
a
g
e
2
institutionalisation, if well known under Apartheid (Posel, 1991), have remained largely
understudied since (Vigneswaran, 2008b, 2009). Second, with the advent of democracy and the
broad transformation of State institutions into integrated, national and inclusive entities, the South
African public administration has purportedly entered a new era, based on principles of equity and
meritocracy (Marais in Bayat & Meyer, 1994; Schwella in Wessels & Pauw, 1999; Picard, 2005;
McLennan, 2008). While South Africa has adopted these policies, as part of New Public Management
(NPM) paradigm (Cloete, 1986; Marais in Bayat & Meyer, 1994), public administration has been
reformed in a rather autonomous way (Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Cloete & Mokgoro, 1995).
5
Unlike
many other African countries, South Africa’s adoption of NPM did not depend heavily on the
compulsion of international financial institutions and donors (Kamekou, 2008). The paper hopes to
enlarge this long overdue rediscovery of the impact of public administration reform in post-colonial
contexts (Bezes, 2007) by looking at a specific case study in South Africa. Third, our efforts to
understand the complexities of this topic benefit from our focus on the Department of Home Affairs
(DHA). Both the structure and culture of this Department are deeply rooted in an Apartheid-era
administrative tradition. Yet, the DHA has been tasked with the imposing challenge of receiving,
regulating and expelling South Africa’s newest population: migrants from abroad. By testing and
teasing out the manner in which senior and ordinary officials within this Department have sought to
resolve this transformation dilemma, we are able to open out a range of less commonly observed
dimensions of institutional and organizational change.
6
Last, while migration policy in South Africa
has so far been envisaged mostly from the perspectives of public policy transformation (Wa Kabwe-
Segatti & Landau, 2008), discrimination against migrants in access to services (Greenberg & Polzer,
2008) and urban development (Landau, 2006), very little attention has been paid to understanding
policy implementation from the perspective of civil servants themselves (except for Davids for
Southern African Migration Project, 2005). Indeed, looking beyond South Africa, the international
literature on immigration policy has been critiqued for its “lack of attention to the sphere of
implementation” (Ellerman, 2005). This is a gap we are intending to fill here for we are convinced it
can reveal entirely new dimensions (such as the instability of the administration and representation
processes among civil servants informing the daily implementation of migration policy) and in
particular produce forms of regulation and statecraft that bear little relationship to policy-makers’
designs. Following Blundo & De Sardan (2007), we do believe it also enables us to get away from the
kind of normative approaches that prevail in the analysis of dysfunctional policy implementation,
particularly regarding the public administration of minorities and foreigners, a growing if still
neglected research field (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 2003).
Object
The case which this paper uses to explore these questions is the implementation of a supposedly in-
depth reform policy, entitled the Turnaround Strategy (TS), within the South African Department of
Home Affairs (DHA). This policy was initiated in 2007 by senior officials in the DHA to profoundly
5
It is beyond the scope of this paper to give an overview of South African public sector reform since the
demise of Apartheid. For such an overview, see McLennan, 2008.
6
Again, it is beyond the scope of this paper to summarise that changing situation. It has been regularly and
extensively documented in Crush & McDonald, 2000; Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau, 2008; Landau & Wa Kabwe-
Segatti, 2009.
3
P
a
g
e
3
transform the Department’s organisational management and output results and was over one year
into its implementation at the time of writing. This policy initiative, although not the first of its kind
in the DHA, offers the possibility of observing public administration reform in one of the most
criticised sectors of the South African public service, fifteen years after the end of Apartheid.
Methods
The type of organizational cultural and cognitive processes we are specifically interested in here are
likely to go unnoticed if studied mostly from official documents and interviews with top civil servants
and policy decision-makers. For these reasons, the research on which this paper is based mostly
relied on socio-anthropological work of a qualitative nature carried out at Home Affairs offices
(Harrison & Market Streets, Crown Mines) in and around the City of Johannesburg between April of
2008 and January of 2009
7
7
This research was funded jointly by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French
Institute of South Africa, and the Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand. The
ethnographic survey at Home Affairs offices was carried out by Colin Hoag under the supervision of Aurelia Wa
Kabwe-Segatti and Darshan Vigneswaran, as part of his Honour’s and Masters’ degrees. The authors would like
to thank the Department of Home Affairs for authorising access to its premises and staff and more specifically
the following persons: Antoinette van den Berghe, Harrison Street Office; Johann Heenen, Market Street
Office; and Florencia Belvedere, Crown Mines Refugee Reception Office.
representing hundreds of hours of work and extensive transcripts. The
authorisations to conduct work at Home Affairs were obtained by the Forced Migration Studies
Programme several months before the research began. The proposal for access was extremely
broad, covering many DHA offices and border posts seeking permission to enter and remain on
premises and to speak to and record conversations with officials of various ranks. The approval was
only granted after a long period of negotiations, involving the Deputy Minister for Home Affairs, Mr
Malusi Gigaba and a range of other officials. As with our previous negotiations with the DHA, it is
extremely difficult to attribute either the months of delay or the eventual approval to any one factor
or shift. What is clear is that the approval rarely entailed prompt and direct access in practice. The
approval helped us develop contacts at each office but on each occasion we also had to negotiate
with Heads of Offices. In exchange, we provided extensive feedback in the form of reports to each
office where extensive research was conducted. Overall and in contrast to some of FMSP’s other
more obviously rights-oriented forms of research, such as our survey at the Lindela Repatriation
Centre,, relations with Home Affairs officials were very friendly throughout this study. Participant
observation and open-ended interviews were conducted at the Permanent & Temporary Residence
Permits sections, at the Inspectorate and at a Refugee Reception Office in order to cover the variety
of tasks performed by Home Affairs civil servants working within the Immigration Directorate of
Home Affairs. Our choice of Directorate was clearly influenced by our initial interest in migration
issues and also the impossibility, given the size of the team, to work in all sections of the
Department. While this constitutes a clear bias to our work, it was also our belief that the
Immigration Directorate, because dealing with non-nationals, constituted a very special vantage
point. Most studies of public administrations in Africa have so far dealt with services in charge of the
national population. We do think, as others have argued elsewhere (Lochak, 1985), that observing
how state officials behave with non-nationals in general and non-nationals with limited rights such
as undocumented migrants or asylum seekers and refugees, is particularly revealing of the
4
P
a
g
e
4
characteristics (in terms of equity, legality, transparency) of the existing public service ethos and
coexisting normative systems. In addition to this, the paper also draws from research conducted as
part of the Public Access to Information Act project (FMSP, South African Historical Archives,
University of the Witwatersrand) and from previous interviews with government officials (Wa
Kabwe-Segatti, 2003; Vigneswaran in Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau, 2008).
Outline
Our analysis begins with a discussion of existing literature on public administration and
organizational culture in post-colonial contexts and of their pertinence for South Africa. The paper
then unfolds in two directions: it first explains the TS “from above”, through its initial diagnosis and
mandate, and contrasts that with how officials on the ground have come to understand and
implement it. In doing so, we show how the NPM paradigm inspired aspects of the reform and
emphasise the gap between the stated political objectives of the TS and its reception and
understanding by civil servants. In the second part of the paper, we outline the main difficulties
involved in creating a more unified and efficient immigration management system. There, we
distinguish between, on one hand, the role played by structural factors, in particular in terms of
understaffing, budget constraints, salary levels and migration dynamics, and on the other, the
impact of the reform itself in shaping civil servants’ prevalent perceptions of an erratic and aloof top
administration and a threatening, irrational public they nonetheless have to serve. The paper
concludes that structural factors, compared to other developing countries in Africa and to the rest of
the South African public service, are not prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in
implementing the reform. Borrowing from Grindle’s analytical framework (1997), it argues that if
some intentions of the TS and of previous transformation initiatives did address some of the core
problems (such as recruitment and performance expectations), these however missed out one
crucial dimension—the creation of a shared sense of mission—and did not perceive the problematic
managerial style dominating the institution. In doing so it increased most officials’ sense of
institutional instability and antagonism with the public, two points which prevent the learning
processes which have actually taken place from spreading beyond certain individuals and certain
sections of the Department.
Reforming public administration in post-colonial contexts: of South Africa and of Home Affairs
South Africa shares with the rest of the continent many of the features of a history of administrative
development characterised by its colonial and post-colonial moments. However, this being said,
major differences set it apart from most other African countries, the most significant of which being
the anteriority of its adoption of Western-style government methods, the degree of
institutionalisation of administrative rules across its territory and administrations and a relatively
ancient if heterogeneous professionalisation of its corps of civil servants (Picard, 2005; Schütte et al.,
1995). Another major difference, but of importance in terms of the spread and nature of dominant
paradigms in the public service, is South Africa’s only very recent decolonisation and subsequent
transformation of its public service (from 1990 onwards) (McLennan, 2008) and, therefore, its
relative autonomy, by African standards at least, in shaping a type of public administration
5
P
a
g
e
5
corresponding to its specific endogenous development needs (McLennan op.cit.: 4–5). South Africa’s
first post-Apartheid-wide consultation known as the Mount Grace Consultation was organised by the
New Public Administration Initiative (NPAI) formed in 1991. McLennan thus summarises the
paradigm shift that emerged from the initiative launched by academics and activists recently
returned from exile and close to the African National Congress (ANC):
They explicitly rejected the generic process model and attempted to move towards a more
appropriate model relevant to the South African context. Key elements of the resolution
noted that the theory and practice of public administration was too descriptive, reductionist
and reifying and lacked analytical technique. In addition to recommending a more
developmental and responsive approach, the resolution called for “more rigorous scientific
analysis, explanation and predication of governmental and administrative phenomena
supplementing their mere description...”
8
As Darbon notes in a paper devoted to public service reform in Africa, the reform wave set out by
international organisations as from the mid-1980s, mostly of neoliberal inspiration, resulted in an
ultra-technicisation of administrations centred around budget rationalisation and management
methods. This emphasis largely depoliticised reflections around public services’ role and actual
capacity in development projects (Darbon, op.cit.: 3–5; see also Ferguson, 1990 and Jobert, 2002).
As opposed to most other African situations where this trend was highly problematic because it
relied on developmentalist and externalised understandings of change, disconnected from the social
dynamics that create the necessary conditions for reform’s ownership by elites and civil servants
(Darbon, op.cit.: 9), the Mount Grace Consultation in South Africa identified that pitfall and
attempted to address it through specific options suited to the South African context.
(Mc Lennan, op.cit.: 4)
However, despite that clear identification of a need to move away from a dominant generic
approach to public administration, one that was convenient to ignore the political and socio-
economic conditions created by the Apartheid government’s policies, the post-Apartheid choices in
public sector reform have had a mixed record. As McLennan notes, this first diagnosis intended to
repoliticise public sector reform was then followed by a moment of pragmatism during which the
technical and productivity emphases of the NPM were very appealing to public services confronted
with the realities of service delivery constraints and public pressure:
Over the first five years of democratic government, there was a shift from a more open and
engaged practice of public administration to a more regulated and bureaucratic style as the
realities of implementation and fiscal constraints became evident. This was evident in a
growing emphasis on the decentralisation of responsibility, performance contracts and
professionalism. The approach adopted was underpinned by an assumption that professional
behaviour combined with rational management techniques would improve service delivery.
(Op.cit.: 10)
Some of these reforms were successful. A well known such success story in the post-Apartheid
transformation of the public sector has been that of the South African Revenue Service (SARS); the
worst failure perhaps that of the Department of Home Affairs. In 2007, Chris Tapscott, dean of
economics and management of the University of the Western Cape, could thus describe Home
Affairs as “the most extreme example of a department that hasn’t properly transformed – it still
embodies the culture of the Apartheid era.” (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, 2007) The question that
8
Fitzgerald & McLennan, 1992: 23.
6
P
a
g
e
6
arises therefore is why have some parts of the South African public administration “made it” and
others not? Why in particular has the DHA resisted so consistently over a period of fifteen years
attempts at transforming it into an efficient and modernised pillar of government action both in
terms of population registration and immigration management?
In order to explain these problems, we turn to the literature on institutionalism. According to Hall
and Taylor, an institution can be defined as the “formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and
conventions embedded in the organisational structure of the polity or political economy”. One of
this literature’s main concerns has been the evolution and transformation of states, and particularly
questions of convergence and difference in organizational form. More specifically, institutionalists
are interested in why states have almost universally adopted a certain category of institutions
(sovereignty, diplomacy, separation of powers etc) while maintaining enduring differences in other
areas (democracy/authoritarianism, laissez-faire capitalism/socialism, multi-culturalism/
homogeneity, etc). The principal—sometimes favoured—explanatory model that institutionalists use
to deal with these issues is that of ‘path dependence’, the principle:
that once a country or region has started down a track, the costs of reversal are very high.
There will be other choice points, but the entrenchments of certain institutional
arrangements obstruct an easy reversal of the initial choice. (Levi, 1997: p. 28)
There are different ways in which institutionalists use the concept of path dependence and various
ways of differentiating between the models. But for our purposes it is perhaps worth distinguishing
between utilitarian and cultural versions. For utilitarians, the objective is to explain why states do
not always adopt the most efficient sets of institutions. They focus on the resources and energy that
states vest in particular institutions and the resource energy required to change them, which
sometimes means, somewhat counter-intuitively, that less efficient institutions constitute the
economically rational choice. Some commonly used examples, albeit not from the field of state
development is that of the selection of the technologically inferior VHS over BETA as the video-
recorder model of choice or the persistence of variation in electrical plugs. In both cases a different
set of technologies would be more efficient over the long term, but now that the choices have been
made, economic rationality dictates that the inferior technologies remain. Cultural institutionalists
use a different logic to explain why institutional change is difficult. Here, the focus is on institutions
as frameworks of meaning instead of simply rules and procedures and persistence and variation are
explained by the fact: that many of the conventions associated with social institution cannot readily
be the explicit objects of individual choice. Instead, as the elemental components from which
collective action is constructed, some institutions are so ‘conventional’ or taken-for-granted that
they escape direct scrutiny and, as collective constructions, cannot readily be transformed. (Hall &
Taylor, 1996: 940).
A good example of this style of argument has been developed by John Ruggie (1993) about the
institution of sovereignty. For Ruggie, territorial sovereignty is so deeply entrenched in the way in
which modern scholars have conceptualised that they have a hard time conceiving of the possibility
that it might change or how a different political system could be fashioned. This is despite the fact,
as Ruggie points out, that if we look back to the medieval period, the political map in Europe looked
entirely different, such that a system of politics that revolved around autonomous, individuated and
bounded political entities would have seemed entirely bizarre.
7
P
a
g
e
7
Recently, Merilee Grindle has sought to apply a similar approach to the analysis of public
organisations in various developing countries (1997). Grindle shows that the second wave of public
sector reforms implemented in the 1990s, following structural adjustment plans, was mainly focused
on instrumental logics: improving salary levels and downsizing public administrations. It however did
not lead to major productivity gains (op.cit.: 481), a myth long perpetuated as part of the
Washington consensus (Gore, 2000). Wondering about how, in those varied adversarial contexts,
some public organisations still manage to perform relatively well, Grindle and her team identify four
key cultural logics—albeit using a quantitative analysis—of public organisations in a range of
developing countries. Those dimensions are: a sense of mission or mystique, performance-oriented
expectations, managerial style and autonomy in recruitment (op.cit.: 488). While not dismissing
altogether structural elements such as salary levels and client demand, Grindle’s argument is that
those were not objective and significant explanatory factors of performance differences in the public
sectors considered. Elements identified as significant on the other hand pertain to what Grindle calls
“organizational cultures”, an alternative already used by others in the analysis of public
organisations (Lipsky, DiIulio). As opposed to industrialised countries, approaches to the
understanding of public organisations’ poor performance in developing countries have mostly relied
on structural adversarial factors: patronage as the basis for recruitment; dependence on donors’
intervention; very limited fiscal basis; low salaries; poor infrastructures and heavily centralised
decision-making systems. Grindle’s argument, however, is that those do not fully explain why some
public organisations still manage to perform well under those conditions and create spaces of
relative autonomy. Her argument is that organisational cultures are more fertile grounds to identify
significant differentiating factors and help to explain the “capacity of public sector organizations to
perform concrete tasks assigned to them by governments, not only by investigating the structures,
activities and human resources of these organizations, but also by understanding the constraints of
their performance set by a series of contextual factors” (op.cit.: 483). This echoes Maurice
Engueleguele’s warning that poor public sector performance in developing countries should not
systematically be equated with an overall decline in state sovereignty understood classically in the
Weberian sense, as the monopoly over legitimate sources of violence (Engueleguele 2008).
This dimension is important here as a number of analysts of the South African context have pointed
to the limited or even sometimes weakening sovereignty of the South African State in the post-
Apartheid period (Bénit-Gbaffou, 2008; Landau, 2006; Monson, 2009). These authors show that by
implementing policies which encourage fragmentation rather than inclusion (as in housing or in
migration management), and by turning a blind eye to widespread human rights abuses and the
development of parallel norms of “mob justice”, the South African government runs the risk of
undermining its own endeavour to set up a more inclusive, people-centred polity. These analyses,
however, rarely distinguish, as Engueleguele recommends and as Grindle does, between
government’s retention of its overall coercive power (for instance, in terms of territorial and
mobility control or in the overall coordination of public intervention) and its actual capacity in terms
of policy formulation and implementation. This distinction between coercion and oversight on one
hand and capacity to deliver on the other will be particularly useful here in identifying and
characterising the limitations of the DHA’s attempt at reforming itself. Extending on the ideas put
forward by cultural institutionalists and Grindle, in this article we not only look at culture as a static
entity, undermining efforts at reform, but at how institutional cultures can themselves by anti-
reformist in nature. This approach to culture therefore differs from purely anthropological ones,
8
P
a
g
e
8
which often stress the relationality, multiplicity, and negotiated character of culture.
9
In order to prepare the way for this argument, it is useful to briefly review the structural and
institutional context of migration management in the late Apartheid and post-Apartheid periods.
Historically in charge of civic affairs (birth, death, marriage registration) and therefore central to the
formal recognition of citizens by the State, the DHA was also in charge (under different names and
with several organisational patterns) of controlling both South Africans’ and foreigners’ mobility into
and within the territory under Apartheid. In the post-Apartheid period, the DHA has remained in
charge of both mandates (registration and mobility control) yet in a totally different political and
legal context as well as a rapidly changing regional migration regime (Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau,
2008). As Darshan Vigneswaran has shown, under Apartheid, the mobility management was
administered by numerous departments of state (Foreign Affairs, Internal (Home) Affairs,
Cooperation and Development, Police, Defence, Justice, Community Development, Trade and
Industry, Agriculture, Minerals and Energy and Transport):
Instead, we
focus in a specific, narrower sense on the ideological capacity of culture to organise, limit or coerce
the perceptions of those individuals acting “within” it.
There was clearly much room within this broad framework for confusion of roles,
misappropriation of responsibilities and manipulation of authority. The key divide lay between
‘discriminating’ Departments and ‘enforcing’ Departments. Whereas Cooperation and
Development and Internal/Interior Affairs (later to become Home Affairs) shared
responsibility for documenting the population, defining areas of legitimate movement, and
communicating these decisions, it ultimately fell to the police and (to a lesser extent) the army
to back up these decisions with force. This had two important implications. First, it meant that
the discriminating departments could make decisions about what sorts of movement were
legitimate, without adequately considering the strategic implications of such decisions for
those responsible for enforcement. Second, it meant that police and army officials possessed
considerable discretion to determine what aspects of Apartheid became a reality, through the
selective use and application of a broad enforcement mandate. (Vigneswaran, 2009: 9)
This is in an important aspect, which shows the genealogy of internal divides and disconnections
within the Department in terms of policy making and implementation and the already considerable
degree of discretion granted to lower level officials—at that time, police officers—in translating
migration policy into acts.
In the post-Apartheid period, the DHA’s incapacity to perform its mandate was enough to earn it the
nickname “Horror Affairs” by the Daily Sun newspaper.
10
In 2003, one of its former Director
Generals, Barry Gilder, even called the Department’s service delivery “a joke”.
11
9
See Fischer, 2007 for a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of culture in the anthropological
tradition.
The transition itself,
10
On one occasion, it has actually led to a hostage situation, when a South African man used a toy gun to
leverage the life of a DHA official against the issuance of his identity document, some six years in the
processing (http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-09-dept-of-home-affairs-criticised-at-toygun-case, accessed
on July 9, 2008).
11
“SA immigration service ‘a joke’” November 2, 2003. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3247767.stm,
accessed on June 17, 2008.)
9
P
a
g
e
9
between 1994 and 2004, was a chaotic period, wrought with rivalries between the ANC and the
Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which was accorded responsibility for the DHA as part of the power-
sharing process in the Government of National Unity. The appointment of the controversial
Mangosuthu Buthelezi (IFP leader) as the first Minister of Home Affairs also hampered South Africa’s
movement toward a more inclusive immigration practice. In particular, the first ten years of post-
Apartheid government, were not enough to see efficient legal and policy reforms within the
Department. Buthelezi and his team, caught in various fights with the ANC majority, did not manage
to alter significantly and progressively a legal and policy frame that was inherited from the late
Apartheid era. Despite the progressive new South African Constitution of 1996, the Immigration Act
of 2002 was nearly ten years in the making, meaning that up until that point, the Department was
functioning under the terms of Apartheid-era legislation. The Aliens Control Act of 1991 — also
known as “Apartheid’s last act” — was framed mostly around concerns over security and policing
and has resulted in a lingering preoccupation of all sections of the Immigration Directorate with such
matters (Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau 2008: 35, 60–61). Also, several key elements of the Aliens
Control Act were deemed in contradiction with the 1993 Interim Constitution and the Constitution
of 1996, meaning that it was made unconstitutional almost immediately after being enacted, leaving
a legal void in its place until the 2002 Immigration Act came into force in 2003 (Wa Kabwe-Segatti in
Wa Kabwe-Segatti & Landau, 2008: 84).
Beyond this problematic and stalled legal and policy situation, the daily practice of migration
management has also been regularly controversial and, in some instances, sanctioned by
Government’s internal control structures. These dysfunctional management practices will be briefly
envisaged here focusing on three aspects: inconsistencies in temporary and permanent residence
permits leading to litigation cases; parliamentary monitoring of the DHA’s budgetary
mismanagement and finally, rampant corruption. Several inconsistencies in decisions rendered by
the Immigrants Selection Board between 1994 and the early 2000s regularly led to court cases which
not only discredited the DHA’s legal team but also spent out its litigation budget usually by the
beginning of the fiscal year.
12
The development of policy is severely hampered by a lack of accurate and comprehensive
data … Labour shortages are thus determined in a rather ad hoc manner. It is vitally important
for the development of a coherent labour migration policy that current methods of data
collection be reviewed, expanded and updated. (1996)
Cases had to do with protests from migrants’ rights NGOs, firms,
foreign embassies or even the South African Department of Trade and Industry against refusals of
permits to highly skilled professionals or unlawful arrests, detention and deportation procedures.
The Labour Market Commission in June 1996 thus commented:
Gerry Eisenberg, immigration advocate, pinpointed the actual root causes of the numerous instances
of dysfunctional practices in the following statement to the Financial Mail in April 1999:
the real problem facing South Africa’s efforts to streamline its immigration policy is not the
legal framework but the administrative breakdown of the department. Give us any rules you
12
For a detailed record of such inconsistencies, see the systematic investigation of journalist Marion Edmunds,
« Home Affairs frustrates would-be immigrants », The Mail & Guardian, 29/03/1996; Marion Edmunds, « The
secret men who decide if immigrants may stay », The Mail & Guardian, 07-13/06/1996; Marion Edmunds,
« Skilled immigrants rejected by Home Affairs », The Mail & Guardian, 12/04/1996.
10
P
a
g
e
1
0
like, but run your department efficiently. […] The department operates in a crippled fashion
and is one of the few with absolutely no credibility. Financial Mail, « A Department coming
apart at the seams », 16/04/1999.
The current situation is one in which mismanagement, corruption, poor productivity and little
political strategic vision have led to discrediting the new asylum system and turning into an unofficial
economic immigration process while the official immigration system still does not perform
satisfactorily in terms of importing the necessary skills into the country (Wa Kabwe-Segatti &
Landau, 2008).
According to then Minister Buthelezi, the DHA was one of the poorest Government departments in
terms of budget allocation. Addressing the Parliamentary Portfolio Commission on Home Affairs in
May 2001, he described a particularly concerning financial situation leading to, among other things,
a moratorium on job creation explaining widespread understaffing and the non-replacement of
infrastructure at border posts. This statement was reiterated regularly and even backed by
opposition MPs at the time. However, a report published in the same period by Auditor-General
Shauket Fakie gave a somewhat different picture of budget allocation and management at the
Department. Among other things, the report concluded to the illegal spending of over 19 million
Rand [1.9 million Euros] as well as to a controversial management of migration control. In particular,
the spending of 4.2 million Rand [420 000 Euros] on deportation that year (well below current
deportation costs though) was denounced along with the illegal functioning of the Market Street
office in Johannesburg and the poor collection of fines imposed on airlines for bringing in
undocumented migrants. The Fakie report was followed in 2001 by the publication of another
report, this time by the Public Service Commission (PSC), which unequivocally concluded to the
DHA’s major management issues:
The PSC said the Department had all the financial and human resource management policies
and procedures it needed in place but lapses in adherence to these had occurred. […] These
(lapses) are ascribed to the integrity of the individuals involved and the dubiousness which
arises when rules are perceived as hampering effective service delivery. (SAPA, 2001)
Finally, different investigations conducted since 1994 among migrants by Human rights NGOs
(Human Rights Watch, 1998 and 2001; Amnesty International, 2001; CORMSA 2007 & 2008) as well
as sometimes internally, by the DHA itself, have uncovered widespread and persisting corruption at
all levels of the administration.
13
13
The following publications offer systematic investigation on the issue of corruption among HA services:
Antoine Bouillon, Les « Amagongogo », Immigrants africains francophones en Afrique du Sud, Johannesburg,
GDR 846, CNRS, Programme de recherches sur les Migrations, Institut Français d'Afrique du Sud, septembre
1996, p.43-44 ; Jonathan Crush, (Dir.), 1998, Beyond Control: Immigration and Human Rights in a Democratic
South Africa, Cape Town: IDASA; Queens: SAMP, p.152-156 ; Human Rights Watch, 1998,“Prohibited Persons”.
Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees in South Africa, New York, Human Rights
Watch, p. 55-60, 111-113 ; Jonathan Crush& Vincent Williams, (Dir.), 1999, The New South Africans?
Immigration Amnesties and their Aftermaths, Cape Town: IDASA; Queens: SAMP, p.49 ; South African Human
Rights Commission, 1999, Report Into the Arrest and Detention of Suspected Undocumented Migrants,
Parktown, Johannesburg, p. 24-26.
The DHA’s institutional and strategic response to these accusations
has been extremely slow despite numerous arrests throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 1998, an
Anti-Corruption Unit was finally set up and constituted of officers from the police and the National
11
P
a
g
e
1
1
Intelligence Agency. Under the direct authority of the DHA’s Director-General, it received 225 cases
during its first year of existence and contributed to the indictment of 69 people. Since then, on
average one hundred cases are uncovered every year, which is likely to be only the tip of the
iceberg. Corruption remains rife throughout immigration services and “prices” for services (from
renewal of temporary permit to asylum application, marriage certificates and airport “passage”) are
regularly updated in NGOs reports (see CORMSA, 2008).
It is against that backdrop of dysfunctional management of a public sector that what was to be
called the Turnaround Strategy would emerge. We shall now turn to its genealogy and design and
confront it with its perception by officials on the ground as revealed in the ethnographic work
conducted in the Johannesburg immigration branch of Home Affairs offices in 2008.
The Turnaround Strategy from above: New Public Management with a hint of organizational
culture
Genesis
Initiated by Minister Mapisa-Nqakula in 2004 as she had just arrived in office following Mangosuthu
Buthelezi’s departure from Government after the 2004 elections, the strategy was however only
officially launched in 2007. At that time, it was presented in the words of the minister as “a
comprehensive long-term programme for the rebuilding of a new and different Home Affairs”
(Mapisa-Nqakula, 2008a) in order to “[put] in place fundamental changes in the culture and
organisation of Home Affairs and the way we do our business” (Mapisa-Nqakula, 2008b: 5).
Interestingly, the setting up of what is considered as the most comprehensive reform attempt since
1994 came with the appointment of a new Director General, Mavuso Msimang, who immediately
highlighted both the leadership fragmentation and the central cultural dimension he saw as the key
challenges to that reform process:
Some people in the current leadership in the department have no appreciation of the extent
of the rot. They believe others are being too hard on them. […] A total culture change is a sine
qua non for the overhaul of the prevailing situation that has deteriorated to a point where not
fixing it would certainly be a catastrophe. (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, 2007)
Others, such as Chris Tapscott, cited before, had already insisted on that cultural dimension: “This
lack of transformation is not about race and colour—it’s about administrative practice and a
prevailing institutional culture of indolence, lethargy and arrogance” (Robinson in Mail & Guardian,
op.cit.). Sven de Kock, CEO of Fever Tree consulting, AT Kearney’s local branch, the company that
was commissioned by Home Affairs to undertake the preliminary research and design the strategic
plan of the turnaround, confirmed that a culture change in Home Affairs had to be “the driver” of
the strategy, rather than the implementation of new technology and infrastructure, which should be
“the enabler” (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, op.cit.).
The decision to base the strategy on a radical assessment of the situation requiring an “about-face”
change in direction was clearly resisted by the former Minister who declared “I feel that [it] has
12
P
a
g
e
1
2
been, somehow, improperly named, and should rather have been styled as a moving forward
strategy, for I do not see that it imposes on the Department a new direction”.
14
While it can be considered that the decision to order an in-depth management diagnosis and set up
a profound reform strategy was belated, thirteen years after the first democratic elections, it is more
accurate to consider that, as from 2004, the necessary institutional and political conditions for that
change to be envisaged seriously were in fact met for the first time. What the 2007 report also found
was that the Department had a 30% vacancy rate at middle and top management levels, rising to
40% among officials on the ground. Until today, senior posts are filled by people in an acting
capacity, which has created a climate of “instability and a lack of motivation” said Sandy Kalyan, the
Home Affairs Director-General’s spokesperson (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, op.cit.).
Minister Mapisa-
Nqakula’s decision was however taken following a new investigation by the Public Service
Commission team into the disarray at Home Affairs. This found that there was a “lack of strategic
leadership and management capacity”, with the result that the Department’s transformation agenda
was collapsing; and “a general crisis response to problems due to a lack of adequate management
plans” (2007). It was fully supported by Cabinet and Treasury, an important dimension given the
substantial budget implications of the Strategy. Although it is yet unclear how much the overall
reform will cost South Africa, the Treasury allocated the DHA R1-billion over the period 2008–2010
for the strategy. However, Mike Ramagoma, special adviser to the Home Affairs Minister said the
allocation would be used only for infrastructure upgrading. Payment of task team members and
outsourced companies will be in addition to this (Robinson in Mail & Guardian, op.cit.).
Outsourcing and ownership
As indicated, the decision was made to outsource the initial research and diagnosis to the private
sector. The Support Intervention Team (SIT) in charge of coordinating the Strategy was a hybrid of
private and public sector specialists led by Kevin Wakeford, former CEO of the South African
Chamber of Business and currently adviser to Eastern Cape Premier Nosimo Balindlela. It includes a
National Treasury task force led by Accountant General Freeman Nomvulo, an IT panel led by IT
strategist at De Beers Patrick Monyeki, communications specialists and a business re-engineering
team from Chicago-based global management consulting company AT Kearney (Robinson in Mail &
Guardian, op.cit.).
In South Africa, the company led the recovery of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) in the
late 1990s, as mentioned earlier in this paper. While this role of AT Kearney was pivotal in designing
the strategy (and it is beyond the scope of this paper to review critically its research methods, on
which there is not much public information available), the Department, and specifically the Minister
and Director-General, insisted on ensuring the overall supervision of the process and creating
channels for the strategic plan to be drafted internally and in a participatory manner at the level of
14
“Address by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, MP, Minister of Home Affairs, at the Home Affairs Annual Strategic
Planning Workshop; 4 March 2004”
(http://www.search.gov.za/info/previewDocument.jsp?dk=%2Fdata%2Fstatic%2Finfo%2Fspeeches%2F2004%
2F04030809461001.htm%40SpeechesandStatements&q=(+(+buthelezi+)+%3CIN%3E+title)&t=M+Buthelezi%3
A+Home+Affairs+Annual+Strategic+Planning+Workshop, accessed 20 July, 2008.)
13
P
a
g
e
1
3
top management. In the 2008-2011 Strategic Plan for the Department of Home Affairs, the first
comprehensive policy document ascribing the TS a central role in current and future DHA
development, that ownership dimension is systematically highlighted:
In phase one of the turnaround programme, from June to December 2007, combined teams of
specialists and DHA officials systematically developed the main elements of the model. A
governance structure was put in place to ensure that the Department had control and
responsibility for the programme, which had 140 deliverables in phase one. The Minister
chairs the Steering Committee. A Vision and Design team, sponsored by the Director-General,
was responsible for the overall design of the new model. A related and ongoing project
provided guidance on the policy and regulatory aspects, including government priorities and
programmes. (DHA, 2008: 28)
The main features of a three-year plan
Building on the core precepts of NPM and the experience accumulated by public management
reform experts, the TS thus represents a balanced design, placing organisational cultural changes at
the heart of its approach, in a broader plan that focuses primarily on increased professionalism. As
we shall see in the following section though, very little of this was directly conveyed to lower
management and staff on the ground. Even the most thoughtful dimensions, introducing elements
of immediate change in service delivery in order to boost staff morale and gain public confidence in
the process (Mavuso-Msimang, 2008 in Strategic Plan: 7), was not sufficiently advertised to be
understood at office level. The Department’s Turnaround Strategy was not accompanied by an
internal communication strategy able to keep staff updated in the Strategy’s development. Rather,
things remained at the level of top officials in Pretoria and were only disseminated in the form of the
graph below, published in the 2008-2011 Strategic Plan, a document that can be downloaded online
but that most officials on the ground hardly ever read.
14
P
a
g
e
1
4
Graph 1. Phases of the Turnaround strategy (DHA 2008: 9)
It is against that backdrop that we shall now envisage how the TS has translated on the ground in the
eyes and words of DHA officials employed in the various sections of the National Immigration Branch
(NIB), recently renamed as the Immigration Services Branch (ISB). The following two section draw
from ethnographic work conducted over several months in 2008 by Colin Hoag at various Home
Affairs offices in and around Johannesburg.
The Turnaround Strategy in the eyes of DHA officials
Most DHA officials report having come to understand the TS (or to not understand it) through
occasional addresses from the Director General (DG), through a monthly newsletter called “Ikhaya”,
or through “circulars” disseminated by Head Office. Among the many improvements understood as
planned or promised are: increases in the quantity and quality of electronic resources; the retooling
of organisational structures; the implementation of a biometrics-based database called the Home
Affairs National Identification System (HANIS) which will integrate a number of existing databases,
including those for nationals and non-nationals alike; the streamlining of ID, passport, permit or
other document processing; and office renovations.
Officials note that there are few signs of a turnaround as of yet, however one noticeable change has
been the increased emphasis on the production of statistics and other measures of accountability.
This has manifested itself differently from office to office. At the Admissions office, for example, the
Strategy seems to have had little impact. The following is a transcription of an interview with one
official who had been working with the DHA for 7 years:
15
P
a
g
e
1
5
- Do you think the Turnaround Strategy is effective?
Hey, I would say, at the moment, I haven’t seen anything. No changes, yeah. It’s only that
change within the section [the splitting of the TRP section into three sub-sections with a low-
level supervisor for each].
- Do you think that it will be successful, the Strategy?
I’m not really sure about the Strategy you are talking about. Explain it, maybe.
- Well, the DG has talked about a big Turnaround Strategy to make the Department more
efficient. So there are a number of components to it, so Batho Pele,
15
Another official from that same section asked cynically “why aren’t they turning around our
salaries?” Still another saw it only in reference to the fact that their office has been moved since
2004 from the 4
th
floor to the 2
nd
floor to the 6
th
floor (with talk of a move to the 7
th
in the near
future) as renovations continue on the office building. Each time they move, applications are lost in
the shuffle, and officials become frustrated at having to resituate their workspace and get used to
another workflow.
and some technology
changes, but-
Hmm. I’ve been hearing about the Turnaround Strategy but, in our region I haven’t seen any
change. (Personal interview 26/6/2008)
At the Inspectorate, the only recent changes noted by officials (which were only assumed to be part
of the Turnaround Strategy) were the imposition of measures which the office had no capacity to
deliver upon. The changes all had to do with accountability and production, as demonstrated
through statistics. Firstly, officials were expected to create a docket for each and every encounter
they have with a suspected undocumented non-national. On any one of the several raids that
officials conduct with the police every week, an official might encounter between 20 and 100 such
people. Even assuming officials could determine who exactly “encountered” whom, this directive is
practically meaningless given the amount of time each official would need to dedicate to docket-
creating. Additionally, the office had an insufficient amount of cabinet space to store these dockets
as it was, much less if they were to be creating the numbers they were being asked to create. The
cruel irony was that the office had been trying to access more cabinets from the Civic Affairs section
which were being stored in the floor below the Inspectorate office. From a window in their kitchen
and dining area, they could see rows upon rows of unused cabinets, but were barred from utilising
them for some unknown political reason internal to Home Affairs.
The only other change that was noticed (and not simply promised), was that the Civic Affairs section
had been given a salary increase several months ago, but because of the reported logistical difficulty
in altering the pay rates at the Head Office, Inspectorate officials were not being paid as they were
supposed to be, nor were they going to be compensated retroactively.
At the Crown Mines Refugee Reception Centre, the situation was much different. The TS there was
not something one heard of or read about, but something witnessed and experienced. The office
15
Batho Pele is another example of a public reform policy intended to place people at the centre of South
African public services and fight corruption.
16
P
a
g
e
1
6
was used as an institutional “enclave” in the sense that Anders describes, where a large amount of
resources are targeted in one direction to establish a foothold or “motor” for change (2005: 89). This
is then used as a testing ground and as a model for the reform’s export to other parts of the
organisation. At Crown Mines, the TS was not termed simply “Turnaround” by officials, as in the
other offices, but rather it was known as “the Turnaround Team”, with an accompanying “they”
pronoun. This reflects the fact that an actual group of consultants came into the office for some six
months, evaluating the situation and establishing new processes for streamlining. Most of the
changes that were implemented as a result take “production” as their focus. Every morning, the
managers of each section convene with the Centre managers for a “production meeting”, where the
quantitatively-verified performance of the previous day is discussed. Given the very substantial
numbers of asylum applicants who approach this office, the emphasis is understandably on feeding
as many asylum seekers through the office as possible and impressive processes have been
developed to achieve this end.
Nevertheless, many at the office, especially the Refugee Status Determination Officers (RSDO) who
make up almost half of it, are unhappy with the changes. They say that they were only consulted
nominally by the Turnaround Team, allegedly as an empty gesture to win their support. Most
especially, they say that the push toward production has resulted in a situation whereby “quantity is
put before quality”, meaning that RSDO’s are not given an adequate amount of time to interview,
adjudicate, and hand out decisions to asylum seekers. RSDO’s are officially allotted 180 days to make
a decision, however by setting targets of around nine applications per day, the reforms de facto allot
RSDO’s a mere 45 minutes. One RSDO who thought that 180 days would be a much more
appropriate amount of time questioned “To whom does this |sic] 180 days apply?” Despite the fact
that asylum seekers are supposed to be told of their constitutional rights, and the interview/
adjudication/ decision process, RSDO’s have only time to ask a few key questions, on which they will
base their entire decision.
Many of the employees at this office, who were carefully selected for their relatively significant
educational and professional background to help establish the trend of pervasive reform at the DHA,
indicated that they had no plans to stay too long at the Department. They were frustrated that their
legal skills (most RSDO’s have law degrees of one sort or another, and several even have their MA)
were hardly being put to use. Instead of “applying their minds” to weigh each individual case on its
merits, they essentially cut and pasted language from similar decisions that they had already written,
sometimes utilising doctored information even from different countries to support their case.
This very brief description of the TS reform measure should help not only to illustrate the current
state of the DHA’s Immigration Services Branch (ISB), but also to demonstrate the extent to which
reforms are subject to significant translation, especially when mis- or un-communicated to the lower
level implementers. It also has shown how, even in settings where substantial energy and resources
are dedicated to the implementation of reforms, there are still certain dangers involved if measures
are pushed “too far”. Over a year into its implementation, the TS reveals fault lines which had not
been anticipated by its designers. We shall now turn to what we identified as the main obstacles to
change, as well as the few conducive aspects, within the National Immigration Branch.
17
P
a
g
e
1
7
The Turnaround Strategy from below: the “magical” “mystique” of South African Home Affairs
The title of this final section proceeds from two different sets of references which we would like to
articulate here. Borrowing on Taussig’s notion of the “magic” of the State (1997), Colin Hoag, in a
recent unpublished Master’s thesis on the South African Department of Home Affairs (2009), shows
how theories of the unstable, “magical” state have been posited in order to express the sense of
vulnerability experienced by those who interact with an unpredictable state (Das, 2004). Our
intention here is to consider the perspective of Home Affairs officials—people who represent “the
state”, and who have been so consistently accused of providing unpredictable service. That is, how
do officials explain the character of the services which they deliver? Armed with officials’
perspectives regarding both their institutional environment and the public they serve, we will
subsequently reinsert ourselves into our broader analysis in terms of the necessary conditions for
institutional change to happen. What we would like to show finally is that, in an already fragmented
and rapidly transforming context, the way in which the TS has so far been introduced might have led
to exacerbate civil servants’ prevalent perceptions of an erratic and aloof top administration and a
threatening, irrational public. Despite tangible learning processes (Heclo, 2002; Hall, 1993), the
reinforcement of these perceptions is currently militating against the diffusion of those learning
processes to those more resistant enclaves in the DHA.
An aloof upper administration relying on obscure, unstable “systems”
As Anders has noted (2005) in his study of the Malawian civil service, for lower level civil servants, a
major reform initiative proposed by the World Bank did “not constitute a grand and ambitious
comprehensive plan [as it is portrayed by upper-level management], but only one aspect of their
daily lives experienced as mundane practices such as getting one’s pay-check, securing a salary
advance or leaving work to take care of a private business” (Anders, 2005: 4). This is to say that
lower-level officials are charged with executing reform measures that may not interest them very
much. Whether officials take up a project initiated at higher levels of the hierarchy is dependent
upon a number of variables, which Lipsky has documented (1980), notably including the legitimacy
conferred by officials on their manager’s policy objectives (ibid.: 18), the degrees of conflict and
reciprocity between supervisors and lower level employees (ibid.: 25), and the clarity of project
objectives (ibid.: 40).
Officials at the Johannesburg DHA offices were constantly complaining that the orders which came
from Head Office were completely out of touch with the realities on the ground. Many of the upper-
level officials in charge of disseminating these orders came to the Department from elsewhere, and
therefore did not work their way through the ranks, where they could learn what the job is “really”
like on the ground. Some officials noted feeling as though they were being used by those at the top,
for example, for the creation of statistics which will improve the manager’s image. This no doubt
complicates the delivery and reception of directives, suggesting that even sound plans could be met
with an a priori degree of scepticism. Officials reported that the relationship between their office
and Head Office were often not perfect. Some reported getting terrible customer service, and
experiencing major delays when requesting information or resources. The irony is that street-level
officials themselves are responsible for delivering on the major Departmental initiative called “Batho
Pele”, or “People First”, in their own interactions with the public.
18
P
a
g
e
1
8
Of course, socialisation which occurs within the organisation can also be counter-productive to the
Department’s stated ends. One official told me about how he was initially energised to get things
moving at the Refugee office and to meaningfully help improve the place. He told me that after
almost a year with the Department, however, he was beginning to wear out: “at Home Affairs, you
find that you push and you push to get something done, but it just doesn’t move. At the end of the
day, you start to think that you should just not try to move things so much” (field notes 20/1/2009).
Ethnographic detail can be particularly effective in documenting how “official” policy and procedure
can be commandeered. ISB officials are as much actors in such a field of practice as anyone. They of
course have their office and Departmental rules and regulations as a compass of sorts, but these are
not sufficient, given that they do not provide detailed instructions for the infinite possible cases
which can and do present themselves. For example, an undocumented non-national is to be
deported. But this rule becomes almost meaningless for Inspectorate officials when this person is a
pregnant undocumented non-national, as I discussed above. Furthermore, Section 11 (1) (b) of the
Immigration Amendment Act of 2004 states that a person applying for a visitor’s permit must
demonstrate that they have sufficient funds to remain in the country. As was noted above in the
case of Dumisani and the Dutch backpacker, this can take the form of a signed note stating as much,
or the official can demand three months of bank statements from the South African host, something
which was also witnessed. Officials must use discretionary power to determine which level of
scrutiny will be sufficient.
A threatening, irrational public
A conversation with a Refugee Status Determination Officer (RSDO) who entered the DHA in 2005
about what had changed in the Department is revealing of the kind of counter-intuitive perception
of the public that can emerge:
- What has changed in the Department?
This place used to be a Centre of Excellence. Now it is not.
- It’s not anymore?
No, definitely not.
- Oh, so it’s gotten worse you mean?
Yes! Now there is too much corruption.
- Oh really?
Yes. Well, let’s say since the beginning of this week [it has improved], but now we have the
fingerprint machines. (Field notes 19/12/2008)
The fingerprint machines to which she was referring are part of a new biometrics system which will
bar applicants who have been rejected asylum from returning to apply under a different name. This
is to say that she was not telling me that the officials are corrupt, but rather the public. Remarkably,
she used the term “corruption”, which is specifically applied by the media, human rights
organisations, and so on to the actions of officials, and applied it to the public. If we pursue this
phenomenon further, we see many instances of this perceived instability, unpredictability, even
danger of the populace. When asked about accusations in the media that DHA officials have taken
bribes to marry South African women to non-national men who want to obtain a “spousal
accompany” permit, officials roundly rejected the assertion. They said that it was rather the non-
national, paying a South African woman to marry him. Migrants appeared to have almost limitless
19
P
a
g
e
1
9
capabilities in officials’ discourse. Many Chinese have worked their connections at various levels of
the Department to obtain documents of one sort or another, and are somewhat untouchable. One
Inspectorate officer reported that before you can even drive a Chinese person to Lindela to be
deported, you will receive a phone call from someone higher up in the DHA advising you to let
her/him go. According to one RSDO, Nigerians simply avoid coming in altogether: “they have their
own ways of becoming legalised, which are only known to them” (field notes 20/1/2009). Others
from various countries allegedly employ other techniques, such as paying a South African to sign a
form stating that the immigrant is the person’s nephew.
Districts such as Hillbrow and Berea are said to be “full” of such “illegals”. According to one official,
you can find a Congolese brother and sister walking around Yeoville as a married couple, with a
fraudulent marriage certificate (in French, he notes), forged in Yeoville itself. Additionally, DHA
officials fret that South Africa is being exposed to weaknesses in outside legal regimes, or that
officials’ unfamiliarity with them is being taken advantage of. They were frustrated by the fact that
weak institutional capacity in foreign states was undermining their own systems. This “mistrust of
the populace” is pervasive at all of the offices visited, where many officials approach suspected
undocumented non-nationals as “clearly guilty until being proven innocent”.
The more general public can be elements of confusion and obfuscation, as well – that is, not only
applicants and their intermediaries. Complaints are regularly filed with the Inspectorate, by South
Africans and non-South Africans alike, as to the whereabouts of this or that company which is
employing suspected undocumented non-nationals or even where non-nationals are residing. The
Inspectorate officials must follow up on these (though there are areas such as Alexandra where
officials will not go, for fear of their safety), however they approach them with a heavy degree of
suspicion. Officials say that these complaints are always motivated by other factors than simply the
desire to punish people who break immigration laws (a fact which seems to offend some officials as
an insult to the importance of their work). Without fail, they say, there is some ulterior motive. This
may be that the complainant was either fired or denied a job by the offending company; or the
company is in competition with the complainant’s own company.
Although officials are socialised by “internal” and “external” factors which establish “the sly client”
as a dangerous object, officials themselves help create and reinforce this image, for example by
spatialising, dehumanising, criminalising, or pathogenising immigrants. Perhaps in response to the
cunning which officials appear to associate with foreignness, migrants are spatialised through a
discursive relegation to abject spaces. One prime example of this is “the Bush”. Because the Crown
Mines Refugee office building is not large enough to accommodate the high number of applicants it
receives, asylum seekers must first queue in an unused industrial lot down the street, before being
taken into the building. The area has almost no shade or protection from the elements and is said to
foster many access problems for asylum seekers who are pushed out of the queue, assaulted, or
abused by security guards who demand a bribe for good queue-positioning. By terming it “the
Bush”, officials have created a discursive space which is wild, untamed, and primitive (that is,
temporally distant). One RSDO pushed this even further, referring to it as “the jungle”, a term which
suggests the classically stereotyped “Africa” of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—one of chaos,
darkness, and danger. Immigrants are also spatialised in the sense that their “outside” status often
conjures up tropes of invasion and occupation of “the inside”. One RSDO said that if you just
approved everyone, it would be havoc in South Africa because of all the people. Use of the terms
20
P
a
g
e
2
0
“floods” and “waves” are also indications, in addition to the common notion that non-South African
men are “stealing our women”, which likens non-nationals to sexual predators, marauders, or even
sly “implanters” of foreign seed.
Migrants are also mystified through dehumanisation or objectification. An Inspectorate official told
me about how on one occasion some deportees escaped or bribed their way out of being deported,
saying that “we had sixteen dockets but only eight bodies”. That “dockets” should equal “bodies” is
significant, and hints at the “docket culture” described by Hornberger (2007), where the work of
attending to individual cases can convert actual socio-legal situations involving members of the
public into lifeless “units”, the less desirable of which can be dumped on officials as a reprimand or
initiation. People can indeed start “piling up”, as one RSDO told me in reference to time pressures in
his work. Such language conjures images of carcasses or refuse, either smouldering in a mound or
even smothering the Department. Categorisation can also be a form of dehumanisation. Here, it will
suffice to provide an evocative image from “the Bush”: The front of the queues for “newcomers” is
the curb of Milky Way Avenue. The first person in line bears a piece of cardboard with the name of
her/his country of origin haphazardly scrawled onto it (“Moraco” was one), worn around the neck
with a piece of kitchen twine. It is a pathetic and degrading act, yet nevertheless must be a prize as
well, given the fact that this is the only person who can be truly said to have a specific place in the
queue (and the first place at that), given the fact that everyone behind is subject to the pushing and
shoving that could displace the unlucky or timid asylum seeker backward.
The criminalisation of applicants is another way that officials contribute to the magicalised public.
Presumption of guilt of course does this, as do the interrogation-style interviews done at the
Inspectorate and Refugee Offices. Most notable here, however, is officials’ invocation of a Simmelian
logic, that the stranger is one who can act outside the realm of accepted behaviour by virtue of
her/his ‘outsiderness’ (Simmel 1950). Many officials from all the offices visited decry that because
the South African government does not have the fingerprints of undocumented non-nationals on
record, they can commit crimes without being traced. One RSDO thus said that one of the “weak
spots” of the Department was that the RSDO’s cannot tell if someone is here for “killing Rwandans”,
because the DHA does not have access to those databases. That is, he says, they are unable to keep
out those applying for reasons of “prosecution and not persecution”, a tag-line which he said was
taught to him at a Departmental training workshop. And finally, what might be called the
pathogenisation of migrants is also an example of officials’ role in constituting a dangerous object.
One RSDO, when asked about the challenges of his job, declared that health issues were foremost,
something mentioned by others as well. He said that they are not given enough vaccinations by the
Department, given their close contact with asylum seekers from all over the world. Oddly—though
perhaps indicative of the potential irrationality of these fears—the illness he feared contracting was
malaria. Another RSDO, when asked the same question, said that a negative aspect of his job was
that the “working conditions here are bad”. When asked what he meant, he cited his exposure to
disease.
The previous section calls for two remarks. First, these perceptions of the public as threatening and
irrational are certainly not specific to Home Affairs and can be found in other sectors of public
administration. However, they are certainly reinforced enormously by the kind of public Home
Affairs officials face and the type of legal culture that surrounds the legitimacy or illegitimacy thereof
21
P
a
g
e
2
1
of foreigners’ presence in South Africa.
16
Second, following from the previous element, these
mechanisms of reification and demonization of the public are widely shared by immigration officials
worldwide and not emblematic of some specific South African construction of the alien (see for
instance Spire, 2005). What we were interested in showing is the role they played in the specific
context of the reform. These deeply entrenched perceptions of both the surrounding institutional
context and the public emerge as so many stumbling blocks in fostering a positive sense of mission
based on the legitimacy of the leadership’s official objectives and on an adequate organizational
response. Instead, the DHA’s top-level officials are most of the time full of contempt for the lower-
level officials who see themselves caught in a web of constantly changing “systems” they struggle to
grasp and manipulate and a public whose presence in the country is in the first place illegitimate and
can therefore only be understood as a threat to South Africa’s modernisation endeavour.
Conclusion
As this paper relies only on work conducted within the Immigration Directorate of some DHA offices,
we shall refrain from generalising its conclusions to the entire Department or even less so to the rest
of South Africa’s public service. However, some modest lessons can be drawn from the analysis
conducted so far. First of all, the South African DHA and its Immigration Directorate have inherited
extremely powerful institutional legacies from the previous regime in terms of staff profile, work
ethics and organizational patterns. These legacies have been largely overlooked in the first part of
the post-Apartheid period due to the IFP/ANC rivalry occupying centre stage and a belief that only
legislative and policy reforms were necessary. The durable ineptitude of the DHA to perform
satisfactorily its migration control mandate in many respects has eventually led to the conclusion
that structural institutional reform was necessary. This occurred, however, thanks to a combination
of contextual South African and international elements. At the national level, the thrust for reform
benefitted from a change in departmental leadership which took place at a time when the
transformation of the South African public sector had already undergone a major paradigm shift:
from depoliticised scientific management under Apartheid to the NPM service delivery-oriented
paradigm. However, although the DHA leadership was clearly open and in demand for NPM
organizational methods, the originality of the South African case is that, as opposed to African
countries which have gone through these externally imposed public sector reforms, the DHA and the
SA Government retained a considerable level of direction and appreciation. Yet, despite these rather
enabling conditions for the reform plan, a closer examination of day-to-day work at DHA offices
reveals the limitations of the TS implementation so far.
Firstly, and despite the clear identification by management of cultural aspects as key to changing
practices, enormous divides between top and lower level officials continue to inform their relations.
16
As it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore fully institutional legacies, we recommend the forthcoming
chapter written by Jonathan Klaaren, “‘Anti-Citizenship and The Dark Side of the Law’,
in L. Landau (ed.) Exorcising The Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence, and Statecraft in Contemporary South
Africa (Wits University Press, 2010) (forthcoming) in which he shows how territory as a cultural product of
citizenship regulation over time in South African history has durably shaped and continues to influence
officials’ perceptions of legitimate belonging.
22
P
a
g
e
2
2
Widespread contempt at the top level for undertrained, unproductive bureaucrats still dominates
while lower level officials conceive their management as unreachable and management’s plans for
the DHA as illegible. More broadly, a sense of being lost in institutional instability prevails among
officials on the ground, perturbed by constantly changing regulations, IT systems, management
personnel and performance targets. The introduction of these as part of the TS reform has even
resulted in exacerbating this sense of underachievement. This divide between lower level officials
and management is not clearly addressed in the TS Strategic plan and does not seem to have
resonated as a key dimension during the various analytical phases that have taken place since 2007.
Secondly, the absence of a shared vision of institutional mission between the different components
of DHA staff is reinforced by representations of the public among lower level officials which
contribute in many varied ways to overemphasizing the illegitimacy and the threatening dimension
of migrants’ presence in South Africa. This not only hampers the development of “an efficient and
secure service to all [DHA] clients” (Mapisa-Nqakula, 2008b), not even to mention a “caring,
compassionate and responsive” one (DHA motto), but it is also in complete contradiction with the
current move towards “an effective management of migration [as] an imperative given [South
Africa’s] need for scarce skills and for regional development” (Msimang, 2008: 7).
Compared to other developing countries in Africa and to the rest of the South African public service,
structural factors are not prevalent determinants explaining the difficulties in reforming the DHA. It
is not to say for instance that major understaffing and poor training are not significant factors, but
rather to see them as the results of limited commitment from management to change and
improvement. Borrowing from Grindle’s analytical framework (1997), the paper has argued that if
some intentions of the TS and of previous transformation initiatives did address some of the core
problems (such as recruitment and performance expectations), these however missed out on one
crucial dimension—the creation of a shared sense of mission—and did not perceive the problematic
managerial style dominating the institution. In doing so it increased most officials’ sense of
institutional instability and antagonism with the public, two points which prevent the learning
processes which have actually taken place from spreading beyond certain individuals and certain
sections of the Department. The recent change in Department leadership following the 2009
presidential elections contains elements of continuity with the Deputy-Minister and Director-
General having been renewed in their positions. However, the policy review under way should
seriously take into account that general sense of instability before considering new radical
transformation of policy and legislation.
23
P
a
g
e
2
3
References
Anders, G. 2005. Civil servants in Malawi: cultural dualism, moonlighting and corruption in the
shadow of good governance. Rotterdam: Law Faculty, Erasmus University.
Bayat, S. & I. Meyer (eds.) 1994. Public administration - concepts, theory and practice. Cape Town:
Southern Books.
Bénit-Gbaffou, C. 2008.Introduction: The place of participation in South African local democracy.
Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa - Number 66/67: i-vii.
Bezes, P. 2007. Construire des bureaucraties wébériennes à l’ère du New Public Management?
Critique internationale, Paris: Presses de Sc. Po., 35(2), 9–2X.
Blundo, G. & J.P. Olivier de Sardan. 2006. Everyday corruption and the state: citizens and public
officials in Africa. Cape Town: David Philip, London: Zed Books.
Brinkerhoff, D. & J.M. Brinkerhoff 2002. Réformes de la gouvernance et états destructurés:
problèmes et implications. Revue Internationale de Science Administrative 68 (4), December,
583-596.
Cloete, J.J.N. 1986. Introduction to Public Administration. Pretoria: Van Schaik.
Cloete, F. & J. Mokgoro (eds.) 1995. Policies for Public Service Transformation. Cape Town: Juta.
Coquery-Vidrovitch, C. (et al.). 2003. Etre étranger et migrant en Afrique au 20
ème
siècle. Enjeux
identitaires et modes d’insertion, Vol. I, Paris, L’Harmattan.
CoRMSA. 2008 & 2007. Protecting refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in South Africa.
Johannesburg, Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa,
http://www.cormsa.org.za/research/cormsa-reports/
Crush, J. (Ed.) 1998. Beyond Control: Immigration and Human Rights in a Democratic South Africa,
Cape Town: Idasa; Queens: SAMP.
Crush, J. & D. McDonald (eds) 2000.Transnationalism, African immigration and new migrant spaces
in South Africa. Special Issue, Canadian Journal of African Studies 34 (1).
Crush, J. & V. Williams (Eds.) 1999. The New South Africans? Immigration Amnesties and their
Aftermaths, Cape Town: Idasa; Queens: SAMP.
Darbon, D. 2002. La culture administrative en Afriques: la construction historique des significations
du “phénomène bureaucratique”, Cadernos de estudos africanos, N° 3, Julho/Dezembro.
Darbon, D. 2003. Réformer ou reformer les administrations projetées des Afriques ? Entre routine
anti-politique et ingénierie politique contextuelle, Revue française d'administration publique,
1/2 (105-106), 135-152.
Das, V. & D. Poole (eds) 2004. Anthropology in the margins of the state. Oxford: James Currey.
Davids Y.D., K. Lefko-Everett, & V. Williams 2005. The Quality of Migration Services Delivery in South
Africa. Migration Policy Series N°41, Southern African Migration Project, Idasa, SAMP.
Department of Home Affairs. 2008. Strategic Plan 2008-2009 and 2010-2011. Pretoria, Chief
Directorate: Strategic and Executive Support Services, Office of the Director General.
Dwivedi, O.-P. & K.M. Henderson (eds) 1990. Public Administration in World Perspective. Ames, IA:
Iowa State University Press.
Dwivedi, O.-P. & J. Nef 1982. Crisis and continuities in development theory and administration.
Public Administration and Development 2, 59-77.
24
P
a
g
e
2
4
Engueleguele, M. 2008. Quelques apports de l’analyse de l’action publique à l’étude du politique en
Afrique subsaharienne », Politiques et sociétés 27(1), 3-28.
Ellerman, A. 2005. Coercive Capacity and The Politics of Implementation: Deportation in Germany
and the United States. Comparative Political Studies 38, 1219-44
Farazmand, A. (ed.) 1991. Handbook of Comparative and Development Public Administration, New
York: Dekker.
Ferguson, J. 1990. The anti-politics machine: depoliticization and bureaucratic power in Lesotho.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fischer, M.M.J. 2007. Culture and cultural analysis as experimental systems. Cultural Anthropology.
22(1), 1-65.
Fitzgerald, P. & A. Mc Lennan (eds) 1992. The Mount Grace papers: the new public administration
initiative and the Mount Grace consultation. Johannesburg: Wits P&DM.
Fitzgerald, P., A. McLennan, & B. Munslow (eds) 1997. Managing sustainable development in South
Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gore, C. 2000. The rise and fall of the Washington consensus as a paradigm for developing countries.
World Development 28 (5), 789-804.
Greenberg, J. & T. Polzer 2008. Migrant Access to Housing in South African Cities. Report prepared
for the Migrants Rights Monitoring Project, Forced Migration Studies Programme,
Johannesburg.
Grindle, M.S. 1997. Divergent cultures? When public organizations perform well in developing
countries. World Development 25 (4), 481-195.
Hall, P. 1993. Policy paradigms, social learning and the state. Comparative Politics 25 (3), 239-255.
Hall, P. A.,& Taylor, R. C. R. 1996. Political science and the three new institutionalisms. Political
Studies, 936-957.
Hoag, C. 2009. Seeing like a magical state: discretion, (de)stabilisation, and the development of sreet-
level systems of meaning at the South African immigration bureaucracy. M.A. Dissertation,
Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, unpublished.
Heclo, H. 2002. The spirit of public administration. Political Science and Politics 35 (4),
December, 689-694.
Hornberger, J.C. 2007. “Don’t push this constitution down my throat!” Human rights in everyday
practice: an ethnography of police transformation in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ph.D.
dissertation. Universiteit Utrecht.
Human Rights Watch 1998.“Prohibited Persons”. Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum Seekers
and Refugees in South Africa, New York, Human Rights Watch.
Jobert, B. 2002. Le mythe de la gouvernance antipolitique, Colloque AFSP Lille, 18-21 septembre, TR
n°3.
Kamekou, R. 2008. The national governance programme (2006-10) and the modernization if the
administration: Cameroon and New Public Management, International Review of
Administrative Sciences 74 (2), 217-234.
Klaaren, J. Forthcoming. ‘Anti-Citizenship and The Dark Side of the Law’, in L. Landau (ed.) Exorcising
The Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence, and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (Wits
University Press, 2010) (forthcoming).
25
P
a
g
e
2
5
Landau, L.B. 2006. Transplants and transients: idioms of belonging and dislocation in inner-city
Johannesburg. African Studies Review 49, 125-145.
Landau, L.B. & A. Wa Kabwe–Segatti 2009. Case study: South Africa. In Human Development Impacts
of Migration, Human Development Report 2009. Washington, DC: United Nations
Development Programme.
Levi, M. 1997. A model, a method, and a map: rational choice in comparative and historical analysis.
In M. I. Lichbach, & A. S. Zuckerman (Eds.), Comparative politics: Rationality, culture, and
structure. Cambridge, UK/New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Lindauer, D. & B. Nunberg (eds) 1994. Rehabilitating government: pay and employment reform in
Africa. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-level bureaucracy: dilemmas of the individual in public services. New York:
Russell Sage.
Lochak, D. 1985. Etrangers: de quels droits? Paris: P.U.F.
Marais, D. 1994. Old and new public administration: the intellectual crisis in South African public
administration. In Public administration: concepts, theory and practice (eds) M.S. Bayat &
I.H. Meyer, 102-112. Halfway House: Southern Books.
McLennan, A. 2008. The academic/ practitioner interface in public administration in South Africa.
The early years – 1990 to 2000,
http://www.dpsa.gov.za/documents/networks/4thConversation/Background%20Paper%20
A%20Mclennan.pdf
Mapisa-Nqakula, N. 2008a. Speech, opening remarks by the Hon. N.N. Mapisa-Nqakula, on the
occasion of the presentation of the 2006/7 annual report of the Department of Home Affairs
to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee, February 12, 2008. Cape Town.
——— 2008b. Preface. In Department of Home Affairs, Strategic Plan 2008-2009 and 2010-2011,
Pretoria.
Monson, T. Making the law, breaking the law and taking the law into our own hands: xenophobia
and sovereignty in South Africa. In Exorcising the demon within: xenophobia, violence, and
statecraft in contemporary South Africa (ed) L.B. Landau (forthcoming).
Posel, D. 1991. The making of Apartheid, 1948-1961: conflict and compromise. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Picard, L.A. 2005. The state of the state: institutional transformation, capacity and political change in
South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Robinson, V. 2007. Can Home Affairs be saved? The Mail & Guardian, 28 May, 2007,
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2007-05-28-can-home-affairs-be-saved.
Ruggie, J. G. 1993. Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations. 47
International Organization, 139-174.
Schütte, L., E. Schwella, & P. FitzGerald 1995. Changing public and development management: South
African cases. Cape Town: Juta.
Schwella, E. 1999. The paradigmatic debate in South African public administration: a continuing
struggle. In Reflective public administration: views from the south (eds) J.S. Wessels & J.C.
Pauw. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Simmel, G. 1950. The stranger. In The sociology of George Simmel (trans) K.H. Wolf, 402-408. New
York: The Free Press.
26
P
a
g
e
2
6
South Africa: Commission to Investigate the Development of a Comprehensive Labour Market Policy,
1996, 1
st
edition, Pretoria. The Commission.
South Africa Human Rights Commission 1999. Report Into the Arres and Detention of Suspected
Undocumented Migrants, Parktown: Johannesburg.
South African Press Agency. 2001. UDM calls on Mbeki to fire Buthelezi. 6 April, 2001, Cape Town.
Spire, A. 2005. Etrangers à la carte, l'administration de l'immigration en France, 1945-1975. Paris:
Grasset.
Taussig, M. 1997. The magic of the state. London: Routledge.
Vigneswaran, D. 2009. Separation anxiety: the historical origins of institutionalised xenophobia. In
Exorcising the demon within: xenophobia, violence, and statecraft in contemporary South
Africa (ed) L.B. Landau (to be published).
Vigneswaran, D. 2008a. Undocumented migration: risks and myths (1998-2005). In Migration in
post-Apartheid South Africa: challenges and questions to policy-makers (eds) A. Wa Kabwe-
Segatti & L.B. Landau, 135-162. Paris, AFD, Collection Notes et Documents de l’AFD, N°38.
Vigneswaran, D. 2008b. Enduring Territoriality: South African Immigration Control, Political
Geography, 27: 783-801
Wa Kabwe-Segatti, A. 2003. The position of foreigners in the ‘new’ South Africa: reforming
immigration policy. 1986-2002. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de la Réunion, unpublished.
Wa Kabwe-Segatti, A. & L.B. Landau (eds) 2008. Migration in post-Apartheid South Africa: challenges
and questions to policy-makers. Paris, AFD, Collection Notes et Documents de l’AFD, N°38.
Wunsch, J.S. & D. Olowu (eds) 1990. The failure of the centralized state: institutions and self-
governance in Africa. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Zartman, I.W. (ed.). 1995. Collapsed states: the disintegration and restoration of legitimate
authority. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner.
List of interviews & transcripts referenced (All interviews were conducted by Colin Hoag in
confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement)
1. Interview with Admissions official, June 26, 2008.
2. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, November 14, 2008.
3. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, December 11, 2008.
4. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, December 11, 2008.
5. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, December 19, 2008.
6. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, January 15, 2009.
7. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, January 20, 2009.
8. Interview with Refugee Affairs official, February 3, 2009.
doc_768958032.pdf