The policy graveyard revisited: why better systems can’t save us from ourselves
South Africa has many policies that are excellent on paper, but often falls short when it comes to implementing these policies. (Photo: Markus Winkler/Unsplash)We can keep writing new policies and passing new laws and launching new reforms, but until we confront the human frailties that undermine every system we build, progress will evade us, argues Dr Claire Botha.
In May 2022, I wrote an article about South Africa’s well-populated policy graveyard, the place where well-written policies go to die. The core argument was simple: we are a country that is simultaneously policy rich and implementation poor. Our problem is not a shortage of ideas, frameworks, or white papers. It is that the ideas rarely make it off the page.
Four years later, Professor Somadoda Fikeni, chairperson of the Public Service Commission, stood before the Madlanga Commission and used a different metaphor for the same phenomenon. South Africa, he said, has become a “cemetery of policies”, some of the best in the world, but not implemented. He spoke of constant changes in political leadership and heads of departments, of intentional delays, of a revolving door that prevents any leader from staying long enough to see a plan through.
Fikeni’s testimony is a welcome confirmation that this is not a niche concern. But the cemetery metaphor also invites a harder question. If we have known for decades that our policies die on the vine, why do we keep planting new ones? And why do we keep believing that the next reform, the next restructuring, the next piece of legislation, the next “governance solution” will be the one that finally works?
The uncomfortable answer is that the problem is not the system. The problem is us.
The seduction of the system
When we talk about fixing government, we almost always talk in the language of systems. We need better coordination. We need clearer accountability frameworks. We need stronger oversight mechanisms. We need to digitise, to professionalise, to capacitate. These are not foolish ideas. Many of them are necessary. But they share a common assumption: that if we get the architecture right, the people inside it will do what the architecture demands. This assumption is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in a way that matters.
The evidence is everywhere once you start looking. A study of leadership in the North West Province’s public healthcare system found that performance management was “compliance-driven rather than developmental,” which “discourages innovation and accountability”. Managers deferred decisions to provincial headquarters, creating what the researchers called an “authority vacuum”. The system was not broken because it lacked rules. It was broken because the people inside it had learned that following the rules was not the same as doing the work.
Consider the many suspensions of public officials. South Africa spends approximately R800 million every year paying public servants who are sitting at home. According to the Public Service Commission, in May 2026 there were 674 officials suspended across national and provincial government, with more than 500 suspended for longer than the legally prescribed 90-day period. One deputy director in the Department of Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities reportedly received more than R5 million after being suspended in 2018 and was later found guilty of financial misconduct.
These are not system failures in any ordinary sense. The rules exist. The timelines exist. The disciplinary processes exist. What does not exist is the will to use them. As the EFF’s statement on the matter put it, what exists today is “not a disciplinary system but an organised mechanism of protecting politically connected bureaucrats”.
The human frailties we prefer not to name
If the system is not the problem, what is? The answer lies in a set of human frailties that we are often too polite to discuss in policy circles, but which every ordinary citizen recognises from their own experience of dealing with the state.
There is the work ethic problem; not just the ability to do the work, but the determination to do it when no one is watching. There is the absence of guilt or shame when the work is not done, the strange calm with which officials can preside over failure without any apparent discomfort. There is the taking of credit for work one did not do, the quiet appropriation of others’ labour. There is the question of how one carries oneself at work, the simple professional dignity that signals respect for the role and the public. And there is the most basic thing of all: whether you show up. Whether you arrive on time. Whether you are physically present to issue instructions, to make decisions, to be accountable.
This is of course not true of every public servant, and many of them, often in under-resourced departments and with little recognition, do all of these things quietly and well; the problem is that their diligence is the exception the system fails to protect rather than the standard it demands.
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These are not abstract concerns. They are the daily texture of a state that does not deliver. A clinic without a manager on site. A department where the director is perpetually “acting.” A municipality where the person responsible for fixing the pipes is at the mall instead. The system may be perfectly designed, but if the human beings inside it do not bring the necessary character to their work, the system is an empty shell.
Why more law won’t save us
The most common solution offered for implementation failure is to turn policies into law. If a policy is not implemented, the argument goes, make it legally binding. Give it teeth. Create enforceable obligations. This was an argument I made in the original article back in 2022, that policies should be coded in law to ensure implementation.
I still believe that legislation matters. It transforms discretionary intentions into binding duties. But the last few years have taught me something that the cemetery metaphor captures more precisely than the graveyard one: a law that is not enforced is just a policy with better formatting.
South Africa does not lack laws. We have some of the most progressive legislation in the world on paper. What we lack is the institutional capacity and the human will to enforce it. Fikeni himself noted that political decisions and constant changes in leadership have blocked policy implementation, including through intentional delays. The problem is not that the rules are missing. The problem is that the people who are supposed to follow them have found ways not to.
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This is where the human frailty argument becomes unavoidable. You can pass a law requiring disciplinary processes to conclude within 90 days. But if the people running those processes are politically compromised, or simply incompetent, or protected by networks of patronage, the 90 days will pass and the official will still be at home, drawing a salary. You can create an anti-corruption body with sweeping powers. But if the people appointed to lead it are chosen for loyalty rather than integrity, the body will become another instrument of protection rather than accountability.
The weakest link
Every delivery system has a weakest link. In South Africa, we have spent decades trying to strengthen the links we can see, the policies, the plans, the frameworks, the institutional diagrams. We have spent far less time asking whether the people who must operate those systems have the character to do so.
This is not an argument for despair. It is an argument for honesty. The reason policies die in the graveyard, or pile up in the cemetery, is not that we lack good ideas. It is that the ideas encounter human beings who are unwilling or unable to bring them to life. Sometimes that unwillingness is deliberate, a choice to protect a position, a network, a party. Sometimes it is simply the absence of the internal discipline that makes systems work.
Of course there are exceptions embodied in the nurse, the clinic manager or the district official who would gladly bring a policy to life but who is overextended, under-supported and short of the staff, supplies and backing needed to do it, and who is left to carry the failure of a system that has not equipped them.
Either way, the solution cannot be purely systemic. You cannot legislate a work ethic. You cannot design a framework that compels someone to feel shame. You cannot digitise your way to professional integrity. These are human qualities, and they are formed and sustained or eroded by culture, by leadership, by the everyday example of those in authority.
Fikeni’s cemetery metaphor is a warning. We can keep adding headstones. We can keep writing new policies and passing new laws and launching new reforms. But until we confront the human frailties that undermine every system we build, the cemetery will keep growing. The weakest link is not the architecture. It is the people. And no system, however elegant, can save us from ourselves.
*Botha is a health economist and policy analyst specialising in public sector policy, health financing, and resource allocation, with over 15 years’ experience across government, NGO, higher education, and research sectors.
Note: Spotlight aims to deepen public understanding of important health issues by publishing a variety of views on its opinion pages. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily shared by the Spotlight editors.