In this interview, Thulisile Madonsela talks about how she transformed the office of public protector into a powerful anti-corruption agency. After a career working in the trade union movement and the Department of Justice, Madonsela became South Africa’s public protector in 2009. The office, established by the constitution in 1995, had a mandate to investigate government misconduct but had primarily worked on administrative justice cases. Faced with an influx of corruption complaints when she took office, Madonsela began to reorganize the agency to better handle that caseload. She identified three main problems she needed to solve: assigning more investigators to corruption cases, creating a triage function to sort through a growing number of complaints, and increasing impact at the level of local government. To achieve these goals, she had to change the culture and performance expectations within the office and secure more financial resources during a difficult period for South Africa’s economy. Madonsela reorganized the office to create an anti-corruption unit, developed triaging criteria, decentralized some functions to provincial offices, created standard operating procedures for investigators, revamped the staff training program, and recruited auditors and forensic investigators. As the reports she released gained attention and brought to light instances of high-level corruption, resistance to her work grew. Madonsela had to fend off accusations and threats and found it increasingly difficult to get resources from parliament. She took care to avoid attacking individuals in the media, to present the investigations as statements of fact, and to link acts of financial misconduct to the suffering of poor South Africans. A 2015 Supreme Court of Appeal ruling further empowered the public protector by declaring that agencies could not ignore the office’s recommendations for remedial action. 

In this interview, Dr. Willy Mutunga discusses reform efforts in Kenya’s judiciary during his tenure as the Chief Justice of Kenya and President of the Kenyan Supreme Court.  He describes his main objectives for administrative reform under the new Constitution of 2010, including implementation of the Judiciary Transformation Framework, professionalizing the judicial bureaucracy, reducing corruption among personnel, and providing judges with more substantive training in judicial procedure and constitutional interpretation. Mutunga also describes challenges he and his colleagues faced in institutionalizing these reforms, including lingering tribal and ethnic loyalties, difficulties in getting regional courts to submit to oversight from Nairobi through forms and other monitoring programs, and competing interests among different constituencies within the judicial bureaucracy. He concludes by describing goals going forward, and which reforms he thinks are most at risk of being undone by future Chief Justices less interested in sustaining reform.

In this interview, Marwanto Harjowiryano describes institutional reforms in the Ministry of Finance, most notably the introduction of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Dr. Marwanto discusses the fiscal reforms and priorities throughout his career beginning in the early 1980s. The bulk of his interview details the structure and implementation of reforms in the ministry. He explains how the reformers distributed the power of the budget office by separating the Treasury, the Fiscal Balance Office and the Budget Office. Next the ministry introduced SOPs in every service that directly contacted the public, beginning with several quick wins or excellent services in every directorate-general. The ministry intended the SOPs to reduce and standardize service times, while also reducing corruption by establishing accountability regarding the cost and time of services. Within the ministry, evaluation teams ensured directorate-generals properly implemented their SOPs and made credible promises.  The ministry engaged with other government agencies to encompass various aspects of their reforms, and Dr. Marwanto describes these joint efforts. One challenge he describes is the difficulty of changing not only behavior but also culture, both within the directorate-general’s staff and among customers. A major element was human resources reform through the introduction of performance evaluations, and Dr. Marwanto details the steps of this initiative. He ends with comments on the sustainability and spirit of the reforms.