ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how South Africa’s public sector institutions responded to as well as sustained the effects of COVID-19. Firstly, it will unpack the logic and consequences of the centralised disaster-managed approach adopted by the government to mobilise the public sector machinery to combat coronavirus. This approach reprised the government’s historical tendency to employ overly complex and hierarchical coordination structures in government to respond to major policy problems, and in the process, generating sub-optimal results. Secondly, this chapter will explain how the coronavirus amplified systemic governance challenges that public sector departments had been struggling with for years, namely financial sustainability, the capacity to deliver, and ethical integrity. COVID-19 heightened these stresses at a time when the country’s appetite for improved governance could not have been higher, and where the discourse around shifting to digital modes of public sector delivery appeared more aspirational than practically attainable.
