With almost half the Cabinet comprising women, the face and shape of power has changed in South Africa. Many of the women lead the clusters, the groupings of individual ministries through which policy implementation increasingly takes place. The country is a world leader in female public representation and last week’s briefings by the full Cabinet provided an opportunity to assess their performance.
Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi
Despite her fondness for government-speak (terms like ”developmental state”, ”governance”, ”capacity” and ”process” pepper her discourse), the Public Service and Administration Minister Fraser-Moleketi is a live wire clearly at the heart of President Thabo Mbeki’s administration.
This year she plans to take her Cabinet and provincial colleagues on unannounced visits to home affairs, welfare and other offices.
In addition, her focus for the coming year includes making the three tiers of government work more closely together. In her media briefing she made 17 promises that will contribute to this and to creating a flexible public service. Various skills programmes have been introduced for civil servants. Fraser-MoleketiÅ¡s spirited determination to shape up and streamline the countryÅ¡s management discerns her from some of her more sedate Cabinet colleagues.  Now, if only she would drop phrases such as ”Alignment of the NSDP, the PGDs and the IDPs”.
Naledi Pandor
Minister of Education Pandor is clearly at home and confident on her new turf. An educationist by pedigree, she spent the first months in office meeting with a range of constituents. Now she’s making her mark: at the beginning of the year she was given responsibility for breathing life into the state’s moribund human resource strategy. Together with Minister of Labour Membathisi Mdladlana, the two must ensure that the big bucks funding the sector education and training authorities, as well as the further education and training colleges, are well-spent.
Her message: skills must start matching demand. She is bolstering the output of maths and science matriculants by revamping school laboratories and boosting the pay packets of teachers of these subjects.
Lindiwe Sisulu
Minister of Housing Sisulu is ballsy and is impassioned about her new strategy: sustainable human settlements to replace the country’s two million informal settlers. She has launched an ambitious housing project in the Western Cape, the N2 Project Gateway — a series of multi-storyed, self-sufficient housing complexes — that, if successful, will be replicated throughout the country to mop up the country’s squatter camps. Her major thrust is to solve the housing crisis in the urban areas because 4% of the country’s population moves into the cities every year, causing massive overcrowding and squalor. She has also broadened the brackets of people who qualify for housing subsidies. Sisulu is gritty, her conversation sparkles with epigrams and her wardrobe — a sartorial variety of pastel suits, tailor-made dresses and pretty camisoles — herald a no-nonsense politician. As with Pandor, she is clearly now on turf she’s more comfortable with. Her previous perch at intelligence meant she appeared aloof and slightly disinterested.
Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula
Freed from her former minister, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Minister of Home Affairs Mapisa-Nqakula is pulling this most obtuse of departments into the 21st century. She has promised to finally complete the national identity system (Hanis) this year; has changed her top leadership in the department and is promising new immigration laws by the end of 2005.
An extensive programme of consultation is under way on the new regulations, though business is already complaining that the drafts will not ease the reputation of Fortress South Africa. Dire skills needs require foreign workers to fill gaps in management, at artisan levels and in almost all the professions.
Without birth certificates and identity documents many poor citizens cannot access grants or other state services. Mapisa-Nqakula’s promise to reduce the turnaround time is probably the one to watch most closely this year.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
As the search begins for a new finance minister, watch this woman. Minister of Minerals and Energy Mlambo-Ngcuka is credited with pushing black economic empowerment (BEE) policy in Cabinet. The charter system is her brainchild. This year she will have her hands full implementing the minerals and development resources Act, which provides mining rights in return for movement on BEE by the industry.
In addition, she is pushing for a hardier beneficiation policy across the resources sector; and she will drive the policy to restructure the electricity distribution system. In addition, the new national energy regulatory will launch in 2005 and the commissioning of new power stations will be ramped up.
Thoko Didiza
The sacking of the former agriculture and land affairs minister Derek Hanekom and his replacement by a young graduate of the African National Congress Youth League, Didiza, in 1999 always meant that she would be under serious scrutiny.
Overall, she is now one of few ministers who seems to have a clue about what is happening in their departments. But she is also now one of few who have missed their target — the completion of land restitution by the end of the year. She now has three more years to complete the programme. But because of the financial and legal constraints she faced her failure has received a sympathetic ear from most of her stakeholders.