The post-apartheid transformation of South Africa's public service sought to rehabilitate merit as a core principle in a nonracial and politically inclusive society. This is unremarkable. What is worth noting, though, are the practical challenges the country has since faced in attempting to clearly and robustly embed merit standards as a central organising feature of its bureaucracy, an undertaking complicated by the ambiguity and recriminations accompanying the practice of ‘deployment’, which has been problematically driven by party political incentives. Merit has been an important feature of historical efforts to reform public administration through the introduction of formal measures to competitively evaluate the technical knowledge and fitness of persons seeking administrative office.

Mid- to late-nineteenth century interventions such as the Northcote/Trevelyan report in the United Kingdom and civil service reform legislation in the United States were intended to counter the administrative instability, disorderliness and corruption wrought by earlier patronage or partisan-driven recruitment into the public service (Ingraham 1995; Greenaway 2004). Merit remained a constant goal of subsequent administrative reform periods, from the archetypal early twentieth-century Weberian official to post- Second World War efforts to restructure developing country bureaucracies to promote social and economic development.

The challenge South Africa faces in applying the merit principle stems from the difficulty of marking a clear division between administrative and political reliability, which has traditionally distinguished merit from patronage values. This challenge, however, is neither unique to the country nor historically absent elsewhere. No less a commentator than the former US president Woodrow Wilson ([1913-1885]: 290-291,) who spearheaded late nineteenth-century administrative reforms, remarked on the importance of merit relative to patronage-driven motives in the American bureaucracy. In distinguishing between ‘political’ and ‘nonpolitical’ offices, he ascribed to the latter the ‘strictest rules of business discipline, of merit-tenure and earned promotion’, and associated the former with party political decisions to ‘make and unmake, reward or punish’. Importantly, he also held that it may be difficult in practice to delineate these two fields where ‘[i]n all the higher grades this particular distinction is quite obscured’. Greenaway's (2004) revisionist critique of the 1854 Northcote/Trevelyan report also challenged conventional beliefs about the weight of its attack on patronage.