How To Steal A Country describes the vertiginous decline in political leadership in South Africa from Mandela to Zuma and its terrible consequences. Robin Renwick’s account reads in parts like a novel – a crime novel – for Sherlock Holmes old adversary, Professor Moriarty, the erstwhile Napoleon of Crime, would have been impressed by the ingenuity, audacity and sheer scale of the looting of the public purse, let alone the impunity with which it has been accomplished.

Based on Renwick’s personal experiences of the main protagonists, it describes the extraordinary influence achieved by the Gupta family for those seeking to do business with state-owned enterprises in South Africa, and the massive amounts earned by Gupta related companies from their associations with them. The ensuing scandals have engulfed Bell Pottinger, KPMG, McKinsey and other multinationals. The primary responsibility for this looting of the state however, rests squarely with President Zuma and key members of his government. But South Africa has succeeded in establishing a genuinely non-racial society full of determined and enterprising people, offering genuine hope for the future. These include independent journalists, black and white, who refuse to be silenced, and the judges, who have acted with courage and independence.

The book concludes that change will come, either by the ruling party reverting to the values of Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, or by the reckoning it otherwise will face one day.

How to Steal a City is an insider account of this intervention, which lays bare how the administration was entirely captured and bled dry by a criminal syndicate, how factional politics within the ruling party abetted that corruption, and how a comprehensive clean-up was eventually conducted.

It is written as a gripping real-life thriller, taking the reader deeper and deeper into the rotten heart of the city. As a former senior government official and local government “fixer”, Crispian Olver was no stranger to dealing with dodgy politicians and broken organisations. Yet what he found was graft that went far beyond the dodgy contracts, blatant conflicts of interest and garden-variety kickbacks he had seen before. It had evolved into a web far more sophisticated and deep rooted than he had ever imagined, involving mazes of shell companies, assassinations, criminal syndicates, and compromised local politicians. The metro was effectively controlled by a criminal network, closely allied to a dominant local ANC faction. What he found was complete state capture—a microcosm of what has been happening in South Africa’s national government.

But there was a personal price to pay. Intense political pressure and threats to his personal safety took a toll on his mental and physical health. He had to have a full-time bodyguard, and never maintained a regular routine. He eventually lost much of his political cover. Olver ultimately had to flee the city as the forces stacked against him started to wreak their revenge.

This is his story.

Public administration comprises two integrated components, namely the political process in terms of which government policy is formulated, and a management process in terms of how this policy must be implemented. The introduction of strategic and performance management systems and procedures in the public sector has become international standard practice, often resulting in a comprehensive redesign of the traditionally bureaucratic legislative framework - strategic management links the government organisation to the community, thus incorporating the actual needs of the community in government's planning, while performance management gears the organisation towards service delivery. Strategic and performance management in the public sector provides an integrated management model for 21st century government organisations. This title is a step-by-step presentation of the strategic and performance management process, starting with government policies and culminating in a comprehensive performance management system. It contains practical examples, activities, relevant legislation boxes and supplementary material for further understanding.

What is Public Administration? How does Public Management operate? Who are the key role-players? What are the principles, and how are these applied practically in the developmental context of South Africa? Addressing the broad topics that form the foundations of Public Administration and Management in South Africa, this text introduces and critically explores all foundational and functional aspects of the development, theories, principles, concepts, approaches and structure of public administration. Key topic areas are accessed in dedicated chapters to provide a solid grounding in the discipline. Students are orientated in the theoretical foundations of public administration and the practical implementation of public management in developmental South Africa, across local, provincial and national government spheres. Covering the role and function of core aspects of public administration and management, topics addressed include: public decision-making; service delivery and policy implementation; leadership and control; human resources management; public financial management; and ethics in the public sector. An expertly designed pedagogical framework supports and develops important academic skills such as critical thinking, practical application and data interpretation. Presented in a real, applied and visual manner, this engaging text is the essential introduction for all students of BAdmin, BA, BSocSci or BCom degrees in public administration and public management.

The fall of Robert Mugabe and the inauguration of Emmerson Mnangagwa as Zimbabwe’s new president in November 2017 were events that no one could have predicted. Just three weeks earlier, Mugabe had sacked Mnangagwa as vice-president, a move that seemed to end the long political career of the man known as ‘The Crocodile’.

In the Jaws of the Crocodile tells the gripping story of how Mnangagwa fled Zimbabwe in fear for his life, and of his brief exile in South Africa, where he declared to Mugabe that he would return ‘in a matter of weeks’ to take control of the levers of power. It describes the military intervention against Mugabe and his allies, analyses the sudden power shift within Zanu-PF, and gives an eyewitness account of the mass demonstrations as people took to the streets to demand an end to Mugabe’s rule. It describes Mnangagwa’s return to Zimbabwe to take over the presidency, and concludes with an account of the disputed 2018 election.

Drawing on interviews with Mnangagwa, his family, allies and opponents, and key political figures, this book gives unprecedented insights into the momentous events that changed the fate of a nation.

Provides a comparative study of the complex governance challenges confronting city-regions in each of the BRICS countries. It traces how governance approaches emerge from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors, working in diverse contexts of political settlement and culture.

The scale and pace of urban change in the recent past has been disorienting. As individual cities evolve into complex urban agglomerations, scholars battle to find adequate vocabularies for contemporary urban processes while practitioners search for meaningful governance responses. Governing Complex City-Regions in the Twenty-first Century explores the ongoing evolution of metropolitan governance as diverse urban agents grapple with the dilemmas of collective action across multi-layered and fragmented institutions, in contexts where there are also manifold centres of influence and decision-making.

Whereas much of the existing literature is founded on the settled urban contexts of Western Europe and North America this book draws on the experiences of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The author shows that governance approaches are rarely designed but emerge, rather, from the disparate intentions, actions and practices of multiple collaborating and competing actors working within diverse contexts of political settlement and political culture. Intended for students, academics and professionals, the book does not offer packaged solutions or easy answers to the challenges of urban governance, but it does show the value of comparative study in inspiring new thought and perspectives, which could lead to improved governance practice within South African contexts.

In recent years, municipalities have had to adjust to dramatic changes in their role in a new democratised system of national, provincial and local government. They have had to accept increased responsibilities in terms of service rendering and some have found it difficult to cope with the growing demands of their communities. South African municipal government and administration clarifies the powers and functions of the local sphere of government, what services communities are entitled to, and how councillors and officials could be made accountable for non-delivery of these services, under-performance or lack of pride in the quality of work done. This second edition of South African municipal government and administration incorporates the most recent developments in this sphere of government. It describes the obligations of councils, councillors and appointed officials with regard to policy implementation, and their accountability for the delivery of high-quality services to civic society. It includes various practical examples as well as rulings of the Constitutional Court, policy statements and reports. Contents include the following: Origins and characteristics of urban areas; Functions and powers of municipal councils; Coordinating structures, composition and objectives of municipal councils; Municipal planning; Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA); Human resource administration and management; Municipal associations and related institutions; Public relations: functions and objectives. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students studying municipal government and administration, as well as aspiring and serving municipal councillors.

To explain the fundamentals of public policy, this best-selling text focuses on the process behind the crafting of legislation. By examining the individual steps-from identifying a problem, to agenda setting, to evaluation, revision, or termination of a policy-students are able to see how different factors influence the creation of policy. Each chapter features at least one case study that illustrates how general ideas are applied to specific policy issues. This new Eighth Edition provides thoughtful updates based on the 2012 election and completely revised case studies.

The Democratic Alliance won control of the uMngeni Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands after the local government elections in 2021. As the only DA-run municipality in KZN, uMngeni provides a template for how local government could work in a post-ANC South Africa.

Written by two leaders at the very heart of the project, Saving South Africa reveals the challenges, the triumphs and disasters the new administration has encountered along the way. It is an eye-opening exposé of how cadre deployment has helped to bring the country to its knees. It is a story of incompetent officials, political spies, gunwielding tenderpreneurs, petty theft and grand larceny.

And yet, as we follow the authors on their journey, there is always hope for a better future as the corrupt layers of local governance are gradually stripped away, revealing the responsive and caring civil service envisioned by the South African Constitution.

The metaphor of 'state capture' has dominated South Africa's political discourse in the post-Zuma presidency era. What is state capture and how does it manifest? Is it just another example of a newly independent, failed African state? And is it unique to South Africa?

The contributors in this collection try to explain the phenomenon from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines. All hold fast to the belief that the democracy that promised the country so much when apartheid ended has been significantly eroded, resulting in most citizens expressing a loss of hope for the future. Read together, the essays cumulatively show not only how state capture was enabled and who benefitted, but also how and by whom it was scrutinised and exposed in order to hold those in power accountable.

The book aims to present a scholarly and empirical understanding of how things went awry, even with various regulating bodies in place, and how to prevent state capture from happening again in the future.

Seth Masket's The Inevitable Party is a study of anti-party reforms and why they fail. Numerous reform movements over the past century have designated parties as the enemy of democracy, and they have found a willing ally in the American people in their efforts to rein in and occasionally root out parties. Masket investigates several of these anti-party reform efforts - from open primaries to campaign finance restrictions to nonpartisan legislatures - using legislative roll call votes, campaign donations patterns, and extensive interviews with local political elites. These cases each demonstrate parties adapting to, and sometimes thriving amidst, reforms designed to weaken or destroy them. The reason for these reforms' failures, the book argues, is that they proceed from an incorrect conception of just what a party is. Parties are not rigid structures that can be wished or legislated away; they are networks of creative and adaptive policy demanders who use their influence to determine just what sorts of people get nominated for office. Even while these reforms tend to fail, however, they impose considerable costs on society, usually reducing transparency and accountability in politics and government.

The era of economic liberalization, spanning 1978 to 2008, is often regarded as a period in which government was simply dismantled. In fact, government was reconstructed to meet the needs of a globalized economy. Central banking, fiscal control, tax collection, regulation, port and airport management, infrastructure development-in all of these areas, radical reforms were made to the architecture of government.
A common philosophy shaped all of these reforms: the logic of discipline. It was premised on deep skepticism about the ability of democratic processes to make sensible policy choices. It sought to impose constraints on elected officials and citizens, often by shifting power to technocrat-guardians who were shielded from political influence. It placed great faith in the power of legal changes--new laws, treaties, and contracts--to produce significant alterations in the performance of governmental systems. Even before the global economic crisis of 2007-2009, the logic of discipline was under assault. Faced with many failed reform projects, advocates of discipline realized that they had underestimated the complexity of governmental change. Opponents of discipline emphasized the damage to democratic values that followed from the empowerment of new groups of technocrat-guardians.
The financial crisis did further damage to the logic of discipline, as governments modified their attitudes about central bank independence and fiscal control, and global financial and trade flows declined. It was the market that now appeared to behave myopically and erratically--and which now insisted that governments should abandon precepts about the role of government that it had once insisted were inviolable.
A sweeping account of neoliberal governmental restructuring across the world, The Logic of Discipline offers a powerful analysis of how this undemocratic model is unraveling in the face of a monumental--and ongoing--failure of the market.

This book presents a new view of American policymaking, focusing on networks of actors responsible for policymaking. Policy change is not easily predictable from election results or public opinion because compromise and coalitions among individual actors make a difference in all three branches of government. The amount of government action, the issue content of policy changes, and the ideological direction of policy all depend on the joint actions of executive officials, legislators, and interest group leaders. The patterns of cooperation among policymakers and activists make each issue area and time period different from the others and undermine attempts to build an unchanging unified model of American policymaking. In Artists of the Possible, Matt Grossman undertakes a rigorous content analysis of 268 books and articles on the history of 14 different major policy areas over 60 years, compiling and integrates these findings to assess the factors that drive policymaking. His findings-which collectively uncover the 790 most significant policy enactments of the federal government and credit 1,306 specific actors for their role in policy change, along with more than 60 circumstantial factors-overturn established theories of policymaking. First, significant policy change does not follow from the issue agenda of the electorate or policymakers. Second, neither changes in public opinion nor the ideology or partisanship of government officials reliably influence the amount or content of policy change. Instead, the patterns of cooperation and compromise among political elites drive the productivity and ideological direction of policymaking. Third, the policymaking roles of public opinion, media coverage, research, and international factors are all limited. Fourth, no typology can explain differences in policymaking across issue areas because the policy process is broadly similar except for a few idiosyncratic differences associated with each issue area.

During the middle and late 1960s, public concern about the environment grew rapidly, as did Congressional interest in addressing environmental problems. Then, in 1970, a dramatic series of bipartisan actions were taken to expand the national government's efforts to control the volume and types of substances that pollute the air, water, and land. In that year, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, which established for the first time a national policy on the environment and created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Additionally, President Nixon created, with Congressional support, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he signed into law the Clean Air Act of 1970, which had overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. The strong bipartisan consensus on the need to protect environmental and human health began to erode, however, during the middle and late 1970s as other domestic and foreign policy problems rose to the top of the public and legislative agendas. Ronald Reagan's election to the Presidency in 1980 marked a dramatic shift in both environmental policymaking and administration. Over the thirty years that followed Reagan's election, environmental politics and administration became increasingly polarized. In this book, James K. Conant and Peter J. Balint examine the trajectory of environmental policy and administration in the United States by looking at the development of the CEQ and EPA. They look at changes in budgetary and staffing resources over time as well as the role of quality of leadership as key indicators of capacity and vitality. As well, they make correlations between the agencies' fortunes and various social, political, and economic variables. Conant and Balint cautiously predict that both agencies are likely to survive over the next twenty years, but that they will both experience continuing volatility as their life histories unfold.

Recent decades have seen growing concern about problems of electoral integrity. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and even blatant disregard for the popular vote. Serious violations of human rights, undermining electoral credibility, are widely condemned by domestic observers and the international community. Recent protests about integrity have mobilized in countries as diverse as Russia, Mexico, and Egypt. Elsewhere minor irregularities are common, exemplified by inaccurate voter registers, maladministration of polling facilities, lack of security in absentee ballots, pro-government media bias, ballot miscounts, and gerrymandering. Long-standing democracies are far from immune to these ills; past problems include the notorious hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and more recent accusations of voter fraud and voter suppression during the Obama-Romney contest. In response to these developments, there have been growing attempts to analyze flaws in electoral integrity using systematic data from cross-national time-series, forensic analysis, field experiments, case studies, and new instruments monitoring mass and elite perceptions of malpractices. This volume collects essays from international experts who evaluate the robustness, conceptual validity, and reliability of the growing body of evidence. The essays compare alternative approaches and apply these methods to evaluate the quality of elections in several areas, including in the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality-of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now-broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized control trials-do not work. They fail, Cartwright and Hardie contend, because they do not enhance our ability to predict if policies will be effective. The prevailing methods fall short not just because social science, which operates within the domain of real-world politics and deals with people, differs so much from the natural science milieu of the lab. Rather, there are principled reasons why the advice for crafting and implementing policy now on offer will lead to bad results. Current guides in use tend to rank scientific methods according to the degree of trustworthiness of the evidence they produce. That is valuable in certain respects, but such approaches offer little advice about how to think about putting such evidence to use. Evidence-Based Policy focuses on showing policymakers how to effectively use evidence. It also explains what types of information are most necessary for making reliable policy, and offers lessons on how to organize that information.

Thinking Government examines the key roles and duties of the Canadian federal government and its public service, and the policy and program debates that revolve around these roles and duties. The fifth edition of this textbook provides students with a core awareness of major issues shaping federal policies and programs - socio-economic policy options, French-English relations, regionalism and regional policy, Canadian-American relations, immigration, environmental policy, and Indigenous relations. This book takes a close look at how prime ministers and cabinet ministers interact and discusses issues in federal, financial, and human resources management, ethics and accountability, and leadership. The new edition is revised and updated throughout and addresses the 2021 federal election and the resulting Trudeau minority government as well as the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thinking Government helps its readers to be smart citizens and knowledgeable critics of what governments do well, what they could be doing better, and why they, at times, fail to deliver effective policies and programs.

Making illegal residence unattractive is a way for Western governments to limit migration from non-Western countries. Focusing on Dutch neighbourhoods with substantial levels of unauthorised migrants, Illegal Residence and Public Safety in the Netherlands examines how restrictive immigration policy influences immigrant crime and perceived neighborhood security. Salient questions arise. To what extent, and under which conditions, do illegal residence and illegal migration impact public safety? Does having illegal residence status influence how people observe or break the law and other social rules? Do their ties with established groups, such as legal migrants, employers and partners, have any sway? Answers to these issues begin surfacing in this rich combination of quantitative information, comprising police figures and surveys on victimisation, and qualitative sources, including interviews at the Dutch Aliens Custody and urban field research.

This study unravels the real dynamics at stake within the Lebanese Madame/Sri Lankan housemaid relationship. Unraveled in this book are the real dynamics at stake in the Madame/housemaid relationship. While cases of extreme physical abuse by the Lebanese women who hire housemaids - Madames - are an exception, what has become normalised are more insidious patterns of domination used to control each and every aspect of their employees' lives. For their part, Sri Lankan housemaids are not merely passive victims. Away from direct provocation and first-hand repercussions, they try to deflect what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'symbolic violence'. These attempts at 'everyday forms of resistance', as defined by James Scott, can help loosen their employers' grip. Yet, as this unprecedented study shows, the Madame/housemaid relationship and the rules that govern it remain under the managerial hold of the Madame.

A comparative study of how economic and political differences between Antwerp and Barcelona influence the life-course trajectories of Senegalese and Gambian migrants. This book examines two major social changes experienced by European cities in the last two decades: post-industrial economic restructuring and new immigration flows. The link between both has been extensively discussed throughout a variety of theoretical approaches and in numerous descriptive contributions. Adding to those studies, this research focuses on three elements of migratory experience that have been relatively neglected thus far: a dynamic view of changes over time, the influence of national welfare and legislation frameworks, and the importance of support mechanisms outside the labour market. The material underpinning the arguments is the qualitative life-course analysis of 81 in-depth interviews with Senegambian migrants living in Antwerp and Barcelona.

Social scientists, politicians, and economists have recently been taken with the idea that the advanced welfare states of Europe face a "New Social Question." The core idea is that the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial environment has brought with it a whole new set of social risks, constraints, and trade-offs, which necessitate radical recalibration of social security systems. "A New Social Question?" analyzes that question in depth, with particular attention to the problem of income protection and the difficulties facing Bismarckian welfare states. It will be necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the future of European social policy.

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM, est. 1996) is an interregional forum which consists of the members of the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China, Japan and South Korea. The main components of the ASEM process include political dialogue, economy, education and culture. Multiregionalism and Multilateralism focuses on the institutionalsiation of intra-regional and inter-regional cooperation in the international system with emphasis on the changing relationship between the EU, China and India. The role of ASEM in this relationship is growing more important because of the growth of multilateralism as cornerstone of the international system.

Crime in the United States has fluctuated considerably over the past thirty years, as have the policy approaches to deal with it. During this time criminologists and other scholars have helped to shed light on the role of incarceration, prevention, drugs, guns, policing, and numerous other aspects to crime control. Yet the latest research is rarely heard in public discussions and is often missing from the desks of policymakers. This book accessibly summarizes the latest scientific information on the causes of crime and evidence about what does and does not work to control it.
Thoroughly revised and updated, this new version of Crime and Public Policy will include twenty chapters and five new substantial entries. As with previous editions, each essay reviews the existing literature, discusses the methodological rigor of the studies, identifies what policies and programs the studies suggest, and then points to policies now implemented that fail to reflect the evidence. The chapters cover the principle institutions of the criminal justice system (juvenile justice, police, prisons, probation and parole, sentencing), how broader aspects of social life inhibit or encourage crime (biology, schools, families, communities), and topics currently generating a great deal of attention (criminal activities of gangs, sex offenders, prisoner reentry, changing crime rates).
With contributions from trusted, leading scholars, Crime and Public Policy offers the most comprehensive and balanced guide to how the latest and best social science research informs the understanding of crime and its control for policymakers, community leaders, and students of crime and criminal justice.