THE engineer submits the plans. Correctly formatted. Peer-reviewed. Backed by fifteen years of practice. He is told to wait. He improves the submission. He is told to wait again. He hires a consultant. The consultant says the submission is excellent. He is told to wait.
At no point does anyone tell him the submission is inadequate. At no point does he fail a technical test. He simply waits, indefinitely, in a queue that has no visible exit condition.
He is not failing to clear a bar. The bar was not designed to assess his work.
South Africa’s post-apartheid public institutions – regulatory bodies, funding committees, professional boards, standards authorities – are not, in their primary function, what their mandates describe. They are deployment nodes. Positions are filled by loyalty to the political network, not by competence for the role. This is not corruption in the ordinary sense. It is the mechanism operating exactly as designed, in conditions it was never designed for.
The selection criterion is signal fidelity: Does this person transmit reliably back to the committee? Technical judgment is not the test. Categorical alignment is the test. The funded mandate – whether to regulate a profession, allocate resources, or produce a public good – was never primarily about fulfilling that mandate. It was about controlling the domain in which the mandate operates.
The gatekeepers consume the mandate. The mandate becomes the cover.
To understand what was lost, you need to understand that it was lost three times.
Hendrik van der Bijl arrived in South Africa in 1920, a physicist trained in Germany, appointed by Jan Smuts to build what did not yet exist: a national electrical grid, a steel industry, an industrial development finance architecture. He founded ESCOM – the institution that became Eskom – along with ISCOR and the IDC, on a single grammar: persons selected for demonstrated capability, not categorical origin; outcomes verified empirically, not rhetorically; institutions insulated from political allocation.
That grammar produced the cheapest electricity in the world. But Van der Bijl was fighting upstream from the beginning. To his east, Ernest Oppenheimer’s Anglo American Corporation – founded in Johannesburg in 1917 with British and American financial backing, sitting atop the world’s most valuable mineral reserves – operated on an entirely different logic: extraction, consolidation, labour control. The mining houses needed cheap African labour, which required the pass system, influx control, the racial architecture of the labour market. Van der Bijl’s grammar – persons selected for capability, not category – was structurally incompatible with that labour regime. His technocratic counter-grammar was never the dominant power in South Africa. It was always the road not taken, running alongside and subordinate to the mineral-extraction economy.
The first deployment wave came in 1948. The National Party’s election victory triggered a systematic Broederbond-directed replacement of English-speaking colonial administrators and technical staff across the public service – the railways, the SABC, and critically, ESKOM itself. Capability was subordinated to ethnic-linguistic loyalty. Afrikaner nationalist cadres replaced English-speaking engineers and administrators not because they were more competent but because they transmitted the right signal back to the committee. Van der Bijl died that same year. The timing was not coincidental. His grammar was already being displaced before his death.
The second deployment wave came after 1994. The ANC’s cadre deployment mechanism replaced the Afrikaner nationalist layer using identical logic – categorical alignment over demonstrated competence, loyalty over technical judgment — now reframed in the language of transformation and redress. Media commentary on Eskom’s collapse after 1994 – the deployed boards, the gutted engineering corps, the R500-billion debt, the daily hours of load-shedding that became a national synonym for state failure – has a single implicit referent: the distance between what Van der Bijl built and what two successive deployment waves replaced it with.
The same operation. Three iterations. Each wave inherits institutions weakened by the previous wave’s deployment logic and weakens them further.
Here is what happens at the gate.
Before your submission is read – before a single line is assessed – the automated system has already run its check. Not on the content. On the category of origin. Think of it like customs: your goods are legal, well-made, genuinely needed. But the system has a flag on the country of origin. The flag fires before the inspector opens the box. The inspector never opens the box. The flag is the answer.
This is why improving the submission does not change the outcome. The submission is not the variable.
The variable was fixed before you arrived.
The moralism came next, and it was designed to make the mechanism invisible.
Transformation. Redress. Empowerment. Representivity. Decolonisation. The capable state. These terms carry no unit of measurement, no completion condition, and no falsification criterion. They cannot be checked against results. They only have to sound right. The communities whose interests are invoked are not asked whether the contributions made in their name serve them.
The language performs concern for quality and process while the categorical prior does the actual work, invisibly, upstream.
A former journalist now working as a rural activist in North West Province, advocating for farming extension services in communities the state has effectively abandoned – put it plainly when we spoke about the immigration crisis and the violence in Richards Bay: “The ANC mismanaged immigration from the onset. A former deputy police minister (of police) warned them a long time ago, but they ignored him. The motive? They were getting favours from those who benefited from cheap labour and labour brokers. Now the poor and working class are to blame. By the way, an economic crisis is a two-way stream – some will be hurt more than others. Money everywhere! The death of a promising democracy. Sounds like a typical African post-liberation trajectory.”
It is not only the immigration failure he is diagnosing. He is naming the structure: elite decisions, working-class consequences, and a moralist register that explains the gap to everyone else. What he calls a typical African post-liberation trajectory is, in South Africa’s case, the third iteration of a pattern that predates liberation by half a century – rooted in the Broederbond deployment of 1948, and before that in the mining house suppression of Van der Bijl’s counter-grammar.
The system has a self-preservation logic that is not malicious. It is architectural.
Every competent professional contribution that reaches the public is falsifying evidence against the deployment state. A functioning grid, a delivered service, a standard upheld – these are the kinds of outputs the mechanism cannot produce, and cannot afford to let others produce either. The queue, therefore, has no exit condition for those for whom the categorical prior has already answered. Not from cruelty. From structural necessity.
The interlock stabilises itself: the ideological structure authorises the deployment architecture; the deployment architecture controls access to the institutional mandate; the moralist register explains this to the public in language that cannot be falsified; and the community whose interests are invoked has no mechanism to register that the explanation does not match the result.
You cannot fix one node without the others pulling it back.
So what do you do?
Your work needs to become publicly legible through a channel the deployment node does not control – peer endorsement, academic adoption, professional use, open publication, community uptake – before any engagement with the institutional gatekeepers can be productive. The work must be in demonstrable use. Then the gatekeepers face a different problem: not whether to admit a contribution, but whether to admit they suppressed one already serving the public.
Van der Bijl did not petition the politicians. He built the output. The output spoke.
The former journalist, speaking from the ground rather than the gallery, offers the harder observation: “I personally don’t care about the story of one person to evoke guilt from South Africans. The elite built this trajectory to the extent that poor South Africans just felt the pressure of hopelessness – the drugs, the jobs, the simple civil decline. Now the elite are using any means to guilt-trip the poor. The problem is structural by design.”
Structural by design.
Not broken. Not captured in the sense of accidental deviation. Designed – across three waves, under three ideological registers – to route professional contribution through a loyalty filter. Designed to absorb institutional failure into moralist rhetoric. Designed to make the queue look like a process when it is, in fact, a wall.
Your competence is real. Your work is good. The system knows this. That is precisely why it cannot let you through.
Loyalty decides who accumulates. Morality explains it to everyone else. Your work is the evidence that the explanation cannot survive.
· Tony Harding is a Johannesburg-based writer and public intellectual, and author of Lekgowa (New Voices Publishing, 2010).
