Plan B with Rebecca Davis

You are being plagued by a problem.

I know.

I'm always plagued, aren't I? The problem that...

Not in the Russian sense, fortunately.

The problem that's plaguing me at the moment is that I'm worried about whether we are able anymore to attract...

Our brightest and most capable people into public service.

And actually, we spend a lot of time talking about how to get incompetent people out of public service and maybe not enough time talking about how to attract better candidates into a public office.

And I'm thinking specifically here of judges and politicians.

So the JSC this round has had a familiar problem from recent years, namely it could not recommend a candidate for the deputy judge president of the labor court yesterday after its interviews, which is going to be a real problem because the current judge president retires later this month.

So there's going to be a real leadership vacuum there.

And it seems that they're also struggling to appoint a deputy judge president in the Eastern Cape Division.

It couldn't last year either.

And it's not isolated.

October 2025, the DBC could fill only 16 of 24 vacancies, even though it interviewed 51 candidates.

And one of the reasons, John, seems to be that It's not necessarily that the pool of candidates is becoming noticeably weaker, but there have been noticeably unimpressive candidates putting themselves forward in recent years.

One of the things that changed is that in July of 2024, the JSC sort of beefed up its vetting so that you had to disclose things like whether you were in debt or And that alone actually has chucked out probably about five candidates last year, either being in debt review or having some kind of a corruption issue, etc.

And one of the issues is that there's a really perverse incentive now whereby if you are actually not the best performing lawyer or if you are somebody who is facing financial problems, you are most likely to put yourself forward before the JFC because you need the judge's salary.

Whereas the country's top advocates, it seems increasingly are uninterested in that judge salary because it's much lower than what they're making now and because there are real issues with that position working under the department of justice in courts which are so badly resourced they have no power and water some of the time huge workloads and you're putting yourself in front of the jsc maybe being humiliated so there does seem to be this issue of a problem with the pipeline of getting the best and the brightest to become judges and it used to be that the the system worked because you would make all your money as an advocate and then at the end of the career you'd sort of go and become a judge and the benefit you'd get is that lifetime salaries even after retirement and you would be motivated by a sense of public service i suppose i sense that the position of being a judge maybe is now considered less prestigious in a kind of social status way than it used to in the same way that kind of all authorities and experts are sort of now viewed as less prestigious than they used to be.

But it's not just judges.

It's also, I fear, politicians.

I mentioned that a few months ago, I was chatting to a political lobbyist who is expressing concern about the quality of MPs these days.

He said that in his multi-decade career, there's been a noticeable decline in quality of new MPs, which is why they're very ripe for influence by political lobbyists, because they can be given questions in policy positions that sort of enable them to look committed and hardworking when maybe they're really not.

And I think we need to seriously turn our minds to this.

How do we get genuinely clever and committed people to believe that these kind of career paths are where they should be rather than, you know, making lots of money in the private sector or trying to find influence elsewhere? What can be done?

I don't know.