Administration
Cyril Ramaphosa decided that he couldn’t rely on the already overstretched parliamentary administration to undertake the responsibility for the Constitutional Assembly. They needed to establish their own administration. Ramaphosa immediately approached Hassen Ebrahim, a senior ANC official throughout the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) process and who had been a senior official in the Transitional Executive Council.
They asked me to apply for the post of Executive Director and I got appointed in August ’94. I moved to Cape Town with two deputies – Marion Sparg and Louisa Zondo. The three of us had to establish an administration with virtually no budget because they had not anticipated this need. We had only started in December 1994 to hurriedly put together the administration.
Together we hired a very diverse staff that came from the liberation movements, political party offices, the civil service. But they all had one thing in common – they were prepared to work for long, unpredictable hours and give up two years of their lives for a common cause.
Hassen Ebrahim
then Executive Director of the Constitutional Assembly
The executive team was appointed in August 1994, leaving just 19 months to deliver on the Constitutional Assembly’s mandate. Budget was a real challenge, initially only allowing for 30 people to be hired. But in the end, about 120 people were contracted to provide technical, legal, research and financial back-up to the negotiators. Receptionists, accountants, travel clerks, media liaison officers, campaign managers and writers worked day and night for two years in Regis House, a four-storey office space in Adderley Street, Cape Town, to perform the varied tasks required by the constitution-writing process. These ranged from setting up banquet dinners for a thousand VIPs to writing copy for advertisements and drafting legislation.
I think Hassen’s vision was to create a new culture around how public administration worked … He resisted an overly technocratic approach in which this constitution-making process would be done as fast as possible, behind closed doors. His approach was very much one of inclusivity and making the process as open and transparent as possible to ordinary members of the public, to the media, to lobbyists and stakeholders and members of civil society who had an interest in the various issues that were being discussed.
Katherine McKenzie
Then Administrator to the Constitutional Assembly
At the same time, there was a deadline, so the CA had to reach consensus on big issues in quite a short period of time … “What that meant was that there was a lot of late nights and I think the expectations from the beginning was that don’t take the job if you’re not going to be prepared to work the hours,” recalls Katherine McKenzie.
We were an extraordinary team. While the Constitutional Assembly gave birth to our final Constitution, my team was effectively the mid-wife responsible for its delivery.
Hassen Ebrahim
summing up the accomplishments of his administrative staff
By the end of the constitution-making process, over 20 million photocopies had been made and almost as many cups of coffee had been drunk.
