When Government Knows What Is Broken But Still Cannot Fix It
South Africa’s harder governance problem may not be identifying institutional failure. It is what happens after the failure has already been identified.
A department can have legislation, reporting requirements, parliamentary oversight and repeated scrutiny, yet remain dysfunctional for years. That contradiction matters because it shifts the question away from whether government knows what is wrong. The more difficult question is why known problems can survive the very systems designed to correct them.
The Department of Military Veterans provides a useful case study. Its difficulties span leadership instability, vacancies, organisational design and accountability. In a CheckPoint conversation, former Acting Director-General Lieutenant-General Derrick Mgwebi describes being brought into the department to help stabilise it while a permanent DG was sought. What was intended as an acting arrangement eventually lasted roughly three years. The significance lies less in one appointment than in the system around it.
Temporary arrangements can become permanent conditions
Government needs acting appointments. Institutions cannot simply stop functioning when a senior position becomes vacant. But an emergency mechanism begins to signal something different when the temporary arrangement becomes the normal way an organisation operates.
WATCH NEXT: CheckPoint investigates the dysfunction inside the Department of Military Veterans
The Department of Military Veterans’ own 2024/25 annual report is part of the broader public record of the institution’s administration and performance. The public service also has formal frameworks governing acting appointments and senior management, precisely because continuity needs to be balanced against the obligation to fill posts properly.
Mgwebi’s account illustrates what happens when that balance breaks down. He describes recruitment reaching the shortlisting stage, only for interviews not to take place. The process eventually restarted, while his own acting tenure continued. The result is not simply an HR problem. Leadership uncertainty begins affecting decision-making, responsibility and institutional memory.
A broken structure can reproduce broken outcomes
Leadership is only one layer. Mgwebi also points to an organisational structure he says originated as a temporary arrangement when the department was established and remained unresolved years later. Nkepile Mabuse’s challenge is the obvious one: how can something conceived as temporary still be shaping the institution almost 15 years later?
The consequences are practical. Organisational structures determine what posts exist, where authority sits and which capabilities an institution is expected to maintain. In the interview, the unresolved structure is linked to vacant positions and difficulty securing funding.
This creates a circular problem. The institution needs capable people to repair the structure, but weaknesses in the structure make it harder to build and retain that capability.
Oversight only matters if something happens afterwards
The deepest problem emerges when failure is repeatedly visible.
Audits, investigations, parliamentary reporting and internal processes can expose weaknesses. They cannot, by themselves, repair an institution. Diagnosis has to be followed by decisions: appoint someone, redesign the structure, implement a recommendation, discipline wrongdoing where established, or assign responsibility for fixing what has failed.
WATCH NEXT: CheckPoint continues the investigation into dysfunction at the Department of Military Veterans
In the conversation, Mabuse points to scrutiny involving the Auditor-General, Public Protector, Hawks, SIU and internal investigations before posing the blunt contradiction: despite all the scrutiny, “nothing happens”. Mgwebi’s response turns attention to where decisions are supposed to be made and who must act on the findings.
Parliament then becomes part of the same question. Departments report performance and expenditure; ministers account to Parliament; Parliament is expected to exercise oversight. Yet oversight loses force when persistent non-performance does not produce corrective action.
The real test is whether the system can close the loop
The lesson extends beyond one department. Institutions do not recover simply because failure has been documented. They recover when information travels through an accountability system and ends in a decision that changes what happens next.
A report without implementation is diagnosis. An acting appointment without a permanent solution is continuity, not reform. Oversight without consequence can identify failure without stopping it.
The strength of an accountability system is therefore not measured only by how well it discovers what is broken, but by whether it can force the repair to completion.
References
Department of Military Veterans. Annual Report 2024/25.
Department of Public Service and Administration. Public Service Handbook 2024.
CheckPoint: The Podcast. Interview with Lieutenant-General Derrick Mgwebi, 16 September 2026.