Professor Mangcu is right that South Africa needs a more capable democracy. But capability, merit and institutional integrity require us to confront the political choices that weakened the state in the first place.
BY ZOLA PINDA:
Professor Xolela Mangcu has posed an important question: what kind of democracy can survive when the institutions of the democratic state lose competence, integrity and public trust?
His recent argument for a “meritocratic democracy” is provocative precisely because it challenges the comfortable assumption that elections, political parties and constitutional institutions are sufficient evidence of a functioning democracy. They are not. Democracy is ultimately experienced through the quality of the state: whether it protects citizens, enforces the law, delivers public services and can hold power itself to account.
But Mangcu’s argument also requires a harder historical question.
If South Africa is serious about rebuilding institutional competence, it must confront the decisions that weakened some of the very institutions through which democracy is supposed to police power.
One of those decisions was the dissolution of the Directorate of Special Operations — the Scorpions.
Mangcu’s diagnosis is compelling. His prescription needs more scrutiny.
Mangcu is strongest when he distinguishes procedural democracy from substantive democracy. The right to vote is indispensable, but it is not the whole democratic project. A citizen who can vote yet encounters a collapsing municipality, a compromised police service, a dysfunctional hospital or a criminal-justice system incapable of pursuing powerful offenders is entitled to ask what democracy means beyond the ballot box.
He is also right that institutional competence matters.
Where I part company with him is when “merit” begins to look too readily synonymous with formal educational qualification. A degree is evidence of education; it is not evidence of judgment, integrity, courage or public purpose. A democracy should demand competence from its leaders, but it should be wary of turning credentialism into a new aristocracy.
The same caution applies to Mangcu’s proposal to abolish provinces. The argument may deserve consideration, but calling provinces “corruption hubs” is a proposition requiring evidence, not assertion. The real question should be what institutional design produces better accountability, clearer responsibility and stronger administrative performance.
His observation that some South Africans believe institutions functioned better under white rule also deserves a more rigorous treatment than either ideological denial or racial nostalgia. Institutions can be administratively efficient while serving an unjust political order. The task is therefore not to romanticise apartheid administration, but to identify which institutional characteristics — professional recruitment, continuity, technical expertise, discipline, accountability and insulation from political interference — were valuable and should be preserved in a democratic state.
Mangcu’s deepest insight is therefore not educational qualification.
It is institutional integrity.
And that is where the historical record becomes unavoidable.
The Road Not Taken
History is shaped not only by decisions taken, but by alternatives rejected.
In 2006, Judge Sisi Khampepe’s commission examined the mandate and location of the DSO. Its conclusion was not that the Scorpions had become obsolete. It found that the rationale for the specialised institution remained valid and recommended that the DSO remain within the National Prosecuting Authority, with adjustments to oversight, vetting and coordination with the police.
That matters enormously.
The state had an evidence-based reform option.
It could retain specialised investigative and prosecutorial capacity while fixing the weaknesses that had emerged between the Scorpions and the police.
Cabinet initially endorsed the recommendations in principle, including retaining the DSO within the NPA, and later acknowledged the tensions between the DSO and SAPS while proposing legal mechanisms to improve coordination.
But politics intervened.
In December 2007, the ANC’s 52nd National Conference at Polokwane adopted a resolution calling for the dissolution of the DSO and the creation of a single police service. The political decision subsequently found expression in legislation that ultimately dismantled the Scorpions.
This is the uncomfortable point that any serious discussion about South Africa’s institutional decline must confront.
The Scorpions were not abolished because an independent judicial commission had found them constitutionally illegitimate or institutionally unnecessary.
They were abolished after a political decision overturned the direction that the Khampepe Commission had recommended.
That distinction is not a matter of nostalgia. It goes to the heart of democratic accountability.
What Was Lost
The argument is not that the Scorpions were perfect.
They were not.
The Khampepe Commission identified tensions with SAPS, concerns about aspects of the DSO’s conduct, and the need for stronger oversight and vetting. It did not recommend preserving the institution unchanged. It recommended reforming it while retaining its essential architecture.
That is precisely the lesson.
Institutional weakness does not automatically require institutional destruction.
Sometimes the answer is to repair an institution, strengthen oversight, correct management failures and clarify lines of authority.
That distinction has become particularly important in the years since the Scorpions disappeared.
South Africa has subsequently invested considerable effort in reconstructing specialised capacity to investigate complex and organised crime. The country has repeatedly discovered, often painfully, that sophisticated criminal networks cannot always be confronted effectively by ordinary policing alone.
The question therefore becomes unavoidable: why dismantle a specialised institution that had been created precisely because the existing architecture was inadequate, rather than reforming it?
The answer cannot simply be that political tensions had become uncomfortable.
A democracy cannot afford to design its law-enforcement architecture around the political comfort of those who happen to occupy power.
Democracy Must Be Able To Police Power
This is where Mangcu’s argument can be taken further.
A capable democracy requires capable institutions. But capable institutions must also possess sufficient independence to investigate power without fear or favour.
That is the deeper connection between meritocracy and institutional integrity.
A technically competent state that cannot investigate political corruption is not a capable democratic state.
A state with highly educated officials but weak enforcement against politically connected individuals is not a meritocratic state.
And a state in which institutions are repeatedly reorganised according to political convenience will eventually lose institutional memory, professional confidence and public trust.
The issue is therefore larger than the Scorpions.
The Scorpions became a symbol of a broader constitutional question: whether South Africa’s democratic institutions are designed primarily to serve the public interest or whether they can be reshaped when their effectiveness becomes politically inconvenient.
The Constitution provides a framework for democratic government. But constitutional democracy also depends on institutional habits: professionalism, independence, continuity, accountability and respect for evidence.
Once those habits deteriorate, constitutional language alone cannot save the state.
We Cannot Rebuild By Forgetting
There is an emerging temptation in South Africa to speak about state capacity as though the country simply woke up one morning and discovered that its institutions were weak.
That is historically incomplete.
Institutions are weakened by decisions.
They are weakened when appointments become politicised, when professional standards are compromised, when oversight mechanisms are ignored, when consequences for misconduct become uncertain and when institutions capable of confronting corruption are weakened rather than strengthened.
They are also weakened when political parties treat the state as an extension of partisan competition.
This is why the conversation about a “meritocratic democracy” must move beyond the question of who possesses the best qualifications.
The more important question is: what kind of institutional system rewards competence, protects integrity and makes it difficult for political power to capture the machinery of the state?
That is a much more demanding question.
It requires us to examine recruitment, appointments, procurement, policing, prosecution, municipal administration, state-owned enterprises and the professional public service.
It requires us to ask why capable officials sometimes leave while politically connected individuals prosper.
It requires us to examine why investigations into grand corruption can take years to reach court, why cases collapse, why suspects sometimes remain beyond the reach of effective prosecution and why the public repeatedly receives the message that accountability is negotiable.
And it requires us to confront our own political history.
The Missing Ingredient: Institutional Courage
Perhaps the missing word in the debate is not merit.
It is courage.
Democracy needs people with the competence to understand complex problems, but it also needs institutions populated by individuals willing to act when the evidence demands action.
A prosecutor must be able to prosecute.
An investigator must be able to investigate.
A regulator must be able to regulate.
A public servant must be able to tell a minister that something is unlawful.
And a political leader must be prepared to accept that democratic institutions are not there merely to implement political preferences.
That is what institutional independence means in practice.
The South African state cannot rebuild public confidence by creating new structures every time an old structure becomes politically inconvenient. Nor can it restore competence merely by changing personnel.
It must restore institutional memory.
It must rebuild professional standards.
It must reward performance.
And, above all, it must establish consequences for those who abuse public office.
Revisiting The Scorpions Is Not Nostalgia
There will be those who regard any discussion of the Scorpions as an attempt to turn the clock back.
That would miss the point.
The question is not whether South Africa can literally recreate the Scorpions of 1999 or 2002.
The question is whether the country should revisit the institutional logic that produced them.
The Khampepe Commission provided a significant answer: South Africa needed specialised capacity to deal with serious organised crime, and that capacity could remain within the NPA while weaknesses in coordination and oversight were addressed.
That conclusion deserves to be remembered precisely because the country subsequently chose another path.
If the present crisis has taught us anything, it is that institutional architecture matters.
The state cannot repeatedly dismantle specialised capabilities and then be surprised when it struggles to reconstruct them years later.
Nor should South Africans accept the proposition that political decisions of enormous institutional consequence should become immune from retrospective scrutiny simply because they were taken through formally democratic processes.
Democracy includes the right to revisit the consequences of democratic decisions.
The Democracy We Need
Mangcu is right to challenge South Africans to think beyond elections.
But the next step is to ask what kind of institutions can make democracy durable.
The answer cannot be a return to apartheid-era administration. Nor can it be an uncritical celebration of every institution created after 1994.
It must be something more difficult: a democratic state that combines constitutional legitimacy with professional competence; political accountability with institutional independence; merit with integrity; and authority with consequences.
That means learning from what worked.
It also means having the courage to admit what did not.
The dissolution of the Scorpions belongs in that conversation.
If we are serious about building a meritocratic democracy, we cannot simply recruit more qualified people into weakened institutions and expect different results.
We have to examine the institutions themselves.
We have to ask why they were created, what problems they were intended to solve, what political decisions subsequently weakened them and what lessons their dismantling offers the present.
That is not an argument against democracy.
It is democracy doing what democracy should do: examining its own decisions.
South Africa does not need a democracy that merely counts votes.
It needs a democracy capable of governing itself.
And that means building institutions strong enough to serve the citizen, independent enough to confront power and professional enough to survive the political fortunes of individual parties and leaders.
Mangcu has opened an important debate about meritocracy.
But if that debate is to mean anything beyond another intellectual diagnosis of South Africa’s crisis, it must reckon with the institutions we dismantled — and with the political choices that brought us here.
Because sometimes the most important lesson about state capacity is not found in the institutions we still possess.
It is found in the institutions we once had, the warnings we received, and the decisions we made not to listen.
About the author
Zola Pinda is a journalist who holds a BA in Journalism from Rhodes University and an MA in Professional and Business Communication from La Salle University, Philadelphia. He has more than three decades’ experience, including work with the National Prosecuting Authority and the Directorate of Special Operations (Scorpions). His writing focuses on public institutions, governance, African intellectual life, geopolitics, leadership, accountability and the public interest. – @NewsSA_Online
Follow us on our social media platforms below:
[…] need for courageous stewardship. In this context, as Zola Pinda argued in an article published in News South Africa on 18 August 2026, the country requires aesthetic guardianship of the public good. Pinda uses an […]