Edition August 2026

Public sector capacity and capability development remains one of government’s key priorities. Since 1994, the institution responsible for training public servants has evolved from the Public Service Training Institute (PSTI) to SAMDI, then to PALAMA and, ultimately, to the National School of Government (NSG).

Recent legislative amendments have given the NSG something none of its predecessors possessed: a statutory reach into local government. The question now is whether the institution has the capacity to translate that reach into impact.

To understand why capacity development has been so difficult, one has to consider what the democratic South Africa inherited in 1994. The new public service was built by integrating a fragmented state comprising the former tricameral parliamentary administrations, four provinces reconfigured into nine, the self-governing territories and homelands, and a local government system that had evolved along separate and unequal lines. Each brought its own institutional culture, standards, systems and interests.

Closing the gap

No amount of structural integration was going to close that gap on its own. The 1994 White Paper on Reconstruction and Development recognised this, identifying the creation of a single public service as both a governance and development challenge, with education, training and retraining central to the transformation project.

What was required was sustained investment in public sector capacity and capability development. It was this recognition that gave rise to the institutions that followed. In many respects, the scale of the integration challenge faced in 1994 mirrors the capability and capacity challenges confronting the public sector today.

Each institutional reconfiguration since then was intended to address the same challenges identified in the 1998 White Paper on Public Service Training and Education: training was fragmented and poorly coordinated, provision was neither needs- nor outcomes-based and much of it was not fit for purpose. The Presidential Review Commission reached a similar conclusion, finding that SAMDI was competing with other training providers instead of setting standards and building system-wide capacity.

Although the institution changed its name three times, the underlying challenge remained. It is tempting to view the 2025 amendments as merely the latest iteration of that cycle. They are not, but only if they are approached differently. Two developments over the past year help explain why.

The first is empirical. The Chandler Academy of Governance's 2026 Global Survey on Public Sector Training, covering 27 institutes across Africa and beyond, found that public service training institutions are evolving from course providers into strategic partners in reform. Although 96% reported awareness of emerging challenges, only 56% believed their structures could respond effectively and just 45% considered their systems future-ready. The gap between awareness and readiness is the real finding, and one the NSG recognises in its own evolution.

Building a capable state

The second development is legislative. The 2025 amendments to the Public Service Act of 1994 and the Public Administration Management Act of 2014 replaced the NSG's founding mandate with a far more expansive one.

The message is clear: public service training institutions can no longer see themselves solely as training providers but as agents of change in building the capable state envisaged by the Constitution.

The amended legislative architecture closes that gap. The NSG can now provide education and training to local government and state-owned entities, prescribe compulsory programmes across all three spheres of government, conduct assessments and award qualifications and part-qualifications directly.

The amendments also enable the NSG to partner with training institutions, higher education institutions, continuing education providers and private training organisations.

Local government challenges

That expanded reach is most urgently needed in local government. South Africa's 257 municipalities employ nearly 295 000 people and carry primary responsibility for service delivery. Yet the Auditor-General's (AG) consolidated audit outcomes for 2024/25 show that only 39 municipalities achieved clean audits, while 100 received qualified or adverse audit opinions.

The AG’s findings point to a consistent underlying problem: weak institutional capability and poor governance. At an administrative level, these shortcomings continue to drive poor financial reporting, regulatory non-compliance and unstable municipal finances. Persistent skills and capacity gaps remain central to the challenge, pushing municipalities towards costly reliance on consultants.

The NSG's expanded mandate was, however, not accompanied by a corresponding budget increase, requiring it to diversify revenue streams and make difficult trade-offs.

The amendments partly address this challenge by requiring accounting officers to budget for compulsory education and training, while making the NSG the sole provider of these programmes, thereby creating a measure of revenue certainty.

The NSG must design, cost and deliver the required training programmes, provide departments with cost information timeously to support budget planning and ensure that training delivery takes into account infrastructure availability, literacy levels, language needs and existing competencies.

Incorporating local government

The principle of shared accountability is now being extended to local government but from a much harder starting point.

Unlike national and provincial departments, which generally have established training budgets, systems and administrative capacity to monitor compliance, many municipalities – particularly smaller and rural ones – still have limitations.

The NSG will therefore not simply replicate its existing training at municipal level. Instead, it is developing a dedicated local government training portfolio, with programmes such as Nyukela, the compulsory pre-entry programme for senior managers, among the first to be adapted.

A widening mandate

The NSG’s mandate now extends beyond formal education and training. It includes facilitating strategic planning and change management, as well as identifying, analysing and responding to skills and capacity needs across the public sector.

The institution now plays a broader ecosystem-building role through initiatives that support traditional leaders, empower youth, induct boards of state-owned entities and develop the capabilities of elected representatives and public servants at all levels. Its work also includes hosting international and continental conferences, producing peer-reviewed knowledge products and supporting private-sector engagement with government.

With programmes delivered in several African countries, the NSG has become a strategic partner in shaping governance and public-sector capability across the continent.

In his 2026 Budget Speech, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana identified state capacity as one of the four pillars of fiscal consolidation. This should reshape the NSG curriculum. From trade law and economic diplomacy to strategic foresight, climate resilience and disaster management, these are the competencies that a capable state will require to advance South Africa's development agenda.

Perhaps the clearest sign of where NSG is heading is the idea of the training institute being an "observatory of the state." A good example of this is the Observatoire de l'administration publique at Quebec's École nationale d'administration publique, which studies how states reform and adapt, monitors public administration reforms across different jurisdictions, and identifies emerging trends in governance and public management. It also produces research, publishes on public policy and management and examines governance challenges within Quebec itself.

The model is interesting because it separates two functions that are usually conflated: building public servants' capability through training and studying the state itself as a living institutional system. So, what gets taught must be grounded in continuously updated evidence, not a static curriculum.

The groundwork has been laid

Elements of this function already exist within the NSG, although they are yet to be formally defined or resourced. These include the African Journal of Public Sector Development and Governance, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published under the auspices of the African Management Development Institutes' Network, and the NSG's masterclass series, which connects public servants with leading South African and international scholars and practitioners.

The institution is also engaged in this work through its participation in the OECD Network of Schools of Government, which connects it to the international community of practice informing assessments such as the Chandler Good Government Index.

Formalising an "observatory of the state" role would consolidate these existing activities into a dedicated institutional function.

Such an observatory would generate continuous research and strategic intelligence on institutional performance, capability gaps, governance reforms and emerging trends across the public sector. These insights would, in turn, inform what is taught, to whom and at what stage of a public servant's career.

This also reframes the NSG's role within the ecosystem. Beyond coordinating and delivering training, it should serve as a source of evidence and insight, helping public training institutions, universities, SETAs, professional bodies and civil society organisations identify capability gaps and target interventions more effectively. ❖