This is part two of the Mail & Guardian‘s annual Cabinet report card.
Back to part one of the report card
Charles Nqakula
Minister of Safety and Security
Grade: F (2004 E)
Crime and security issues seem to have a permanent place on the South African dinner-table agenda. If men are not attacking young children, heavily armed robbers are staging audacious heists at malls or on the roads.
Against this background, Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula’s almost invisible approach to citizens’ daily worries does him no favours. As we said last year, he cannot continue running the ministry as though it were an inconsequential bureaucracy.
In fairness, his task is unenviable. His ministry has to deliver law and order in a context of a poorly educated populace, massive inequalities and poor infrastructure. He does not control the process that determines the police budget, and thus cannot deal properly with poor salaries and the South African Police Service’s (SAPS) lack of crime-fighting equipment, including patrol cars and bulletproof vests.
But his reticence – in contrast with the charisma and extroversion of his predecessor, Steve Tshwete – means that he punches below his weight in the Cabinet. Neither does he seem to be interested in sharing his dilemmas with South Africans. The Gauteng minister of safety and community liaison, Firoz Cachalia, has a higher and more dynamic profile.
Nqakula also appears to have an arm’s-length relationship with his Director General, National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi. Their frosty relationship continues to deprive a society in need of reassurance that the two men principally tasked with their safety speak with one voice.
One of their few agreements seems to be over the Scorpions. As the Khampepe inquiry made clear, they both believe the elite unit should be incorporated in the SAPS.
The relationship between the two brings us, ironically, to what may have been Nqakula’s saving grace in a difficult year.
Contrary to the war talk coming from Selebi’s office that the gun-licence laws would not be revisited, it has since been established that Nqakula did meet with the gun lobby with the aim of finding ways of tackling the administrative backlog in the processing of licences.
Naledi Pandor
Minister of Education
Grade: D (2004 C+)
Few events epitomise Pandor’s tenure better than the “national consultative conference” she convened in Durban this year. For three days in May, delegates from a huge range of educational organisations wandered in bewildered fashion from session to session, asking each other during tea breaks what they were expected to do there and what the conference was meant to achieve.
One clue was in the conference’s subtitle: “Deepening the education policy dialogue”. Another was in the ubiquitous appearance of the word “consensus” in the reams of documents the Department of Education produced before, during and after the conference. And most telling of all was the mysterious way Pandor produced a “conference declaration” in the final session, read it out to a depleted auditorium, and announced that as there were no objections the declaration was formally adopted.
The declaration has no formal policy status and merely repeated what “education policy dialogues” have said for decades. Was it worth the R2-million tab for delegates’ accommodation and travel?
Our report last year commended Pandor for consulting beyond the closed inner circle of bureaucrats on whom her predecessor, Kader Asmal, largely relied. But we also warned that in her second year she would need to move beyond consultation towards concrete outcomes and actions. Of these there have been almost none.
Where Asmal showed a cavalier disregard for ruffled feathers in ramming through policies – however problematic they turned out to be – Pandor seems over-anxious to avoid conflict and claim “consensus” where none exists. The result has been a year of fine speeches – and little concrete progress in tackling the vast backlogs in schooling quality, university access, adult basic education, and training and early childhood development.
Despite Pandor’s recent reference in the National Council of Provinces to “pessimistic journalists who revel in predicting failure”, let us repeat: the plan to introduce “no fee” schools next year will fail for a variety of reasons, including its complexity. It is far more tangled than even the fee-exemption policy which the department eventually conceded was not working. Why can Pandor not grasp the nettle and introduce free basic education for all? She would have the backing not only of the Constitution but of every major teacher union as well. The doors of learning still firmly shut against many of poor children would open.
That’s assuming there are enough teachers to teach them: the year ended with educationists predicting dire shortages over the next five to 10 years. The department typically denied there would be any particular problem – qualified teachers who had left the profession would somehow be re-recruited.
When the school system is ailing, the effects are felt throughout the entire education terrain – most obviously on universities, but also early childhood development, further education and training colleges, and adult basic education and training.
And this is why the lack of a firm steering vision from the centre – the ministry – is causing damage that may last for decades. Time to take control and kick butt, minister – starting with your own bureaucrats.
Jeff Radebe
Minister of Transport
Grade: B (2004 C)
Radebe can be in no doubt that South Africa’s public transport system needs a plan. In the past few months, the burning of metro trains, the Gautrain debate and continuing taxi violence have thrown the inadequacies of the system into harsh relief. Critics say he talks a lot, but is doing little.
The end of year brought controversy – over the Gautrain – and some relief for Radebe with the announcement of a R25-billion injection into Metrorail’s ageing infrastructure. Many officials in his own department were unhappy that he seemed to lack political clout on the Gautrain issue and did not oppose the project more vocally. But the R5-billion a year he won for Metrorail has gone some way to restoring his credibility.
With the Cabinet’s approval of Gautrain, Radebe will have to ensure his suggestion of integrating the R20-billion project with other commuter transport systems, such as Metrorail and the bus network, is taken seriously.
Commuter transport is not in a healthy state. Many buses have not received new permits since 1994. Stakeholders are calling for the minister to implement the long-awaited Transport Planning Authority to streamline public transport.
Radebe is given some credit for restarting the taxi recapitalisation programme, aimed at renewing the national fleet, but visible reform still seems a long way off. The pit stops for the different phases keep shifting, and when he promised that the scrapping of old taxis would be introduced earlier this year, there were wry smiles – which turned out to be justified. By end-2005, the programme has not progressed beyond speeches.
The road network and its R65-billion maintenance backlog also remain a huge challenge.
One of Radebe’s biggest problems remains an inadequate budget, R7,6-billion, most of which goes towards subsidising transport – excluding taxis. Critics say a multi-ticketing system is needed, but the minister simply does not have the budget to implement such a system.
Though the taxi recapitalisation programme received R885-million for the next three years, it is unclear whether the additional funding will inject momentum into the project.
On road safety, Radebe has a long way to go. The stalling of the taxi recap programme has been a big setback for safer roads. The highly problematic Road Accident Fund, which has been plagued by corruption estimated to cost the country R500-million a year, was redesigned and new legislation drafted.
But the new regime is not seen as a significant improvement, as it limits victims’ right to claim after an accident. Critics have also called for the government to purge the fund of the many parasitic lawyers who monopolise it. The fund is technically insolvent, and too much money is spent on litigation, while not enough gets through to victims. But Radebe is seen to have taken a positive step by giving its chief executive, Humphrey Kgomongwe, the boot.
Lindiwe Sisulu
Minister of Housing
Grade: A (2004 A)
Good ideas do not necessarily translate into reality, however energetic the minister may be.
Sisulu’s vigorous, hands-on style was illustrated by the tracksuit she donned to help build houses in Masiphumelele, near Cape Town. But she is still chasing the R42-billion the banks promised for low-cost housing two years after the financial charter was agreed, as the banks continue to hang tough for the government’s risk guarantees.
This is her biggest test: the money could begin to shift apartheid urban planning that banned poor, mainly black, communities to the outskirts of the cities where transport is costly and jobs rare. The aim is cheap mortgage bonds and an end to red-lining.
Despite the construction of 1,6-million houses in a decade, the housing backlog still stands at 2,4-million.
Six months after Sisulu’s move from the intelligence portfolio came the release of the Comprehensive Sustainable Human Settlement Plan. This emphasises social housing, with low-cost units for rent or purchase in developments within city limits, featuring commercial opportunities. The owner contribution of R2Â 479 was scrapped for those earning less than R1Â 500 a month, rural residents, the elderly, disabled and indigent. Also, a drive to issue title deeds with all houses has taken off.
Slum eradication by 2014 is still on the table, but the government’s lead venture, the N2 Gateway Project, illustrates how hard it will be to meet the deadline. Problems with the Gateway include developers’ unhappiness over cash flows, political head-knocking between officials of all three spheres of the government and concerns over how to allocate the units.
The prospect of poorer families in wealthy suburbs – and particularly the minister’s proposal that 30% of all developments should be reserved for low-cost homes – has unsettled the golfing classes.
Sisulu’s department has been run by an acting director general for a year, after the departure of the long-standing housing director general Mpumi Nxumalo and later Nxumalo’s replacement in an acting capacity, Ahmedi Vawda. Low morale is said to have improved, but the lack of a permanent head of department is clearly not ideal.
Zola Skweyiya
Minister of Social Development
Grade: C (2004 B)
Skweyiya has kept a relatively low media profile this year, owing in part to poor health. But his department has notched up some achievements. The anti-fraud campaign paid dividends, with 43Â 000 civil servants being identified as beneficiaries of social grants, most of them illegal. It must now act – the welfare department, more than any other, cannot be seen to condone theft from the poor.
The idea of offering indemnity to citizens illegally receiving social grants was a masterstroke. More than 80Â 000 people have come forward to fess up this year, saving the government about R500Â 000 in the medium-term expenditure framework period. But officials concede that many more remain illegally in the system. Catching welfare cheats is not enough – safeguards are needed to prevent malfeasance on such a massive scale. South Africa is still waiting for the social security agency Skweyiya says is a step in that direction.
The agency is also meant to ensure that those entitled to social security grants get them, and get them on time. This year, the CEO and an advisory panel were appointed and head offices set up. Provincial managers are about to be installed.
The department says the child support grant has reached six million children. But it is facing a considerable challenge in rural provinces such as the Eastern Cape, Free State and North West, where the uptake is very low. The department has faced difficulty in trying to help Aids orphans, where red tape means the process to register children for foster care grants is incredibly slow. So far, 300Â 000 children are accessing the foster care grants, but welfare workers believe that is only a proportion of a bigger pool of children in need.
The programme to eliminate the phenomenon of child-headed households through arranging foster caring requires lengthy assessments by social workers and magistrates before foster parents are registered. Skweyiya therefore has to find a way to make the system work as Aids begins to take a greater toll and more children find themselves without parents.
Skweyiya is a compassionate man and has intervened on several occasions this year on behalf of poor South Africans. He stepped in to halt the food parcel scheme when it became apparent that the companies distributing the packages were benefiting more than the recipients.
But there is still a question mark over his wife’s acceptance of a R65Â 000 loan from Sandi Majali, who is involved in companies that distribute social grants. Majali has not denied paying for renovations to Skweyiya’s house in Pretoria after receiving a R15-million advance from oil parastatal PetroSA in the Oilgate scandal.
Buyelwa Sonjica
Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry
Grade: D (2004 C-)
Sonjica could more appropriately be called a minister without portfolio. “We no longer directly provide taps and toilets or grow trees,” she said in her budget vote speech in May, these functions now being provided by municipalities, private entities and parastatals.
Her role is “to lead these sectors … to monitor progress in our strategic areas of delivery so that we can intervene quickly when things go off track”.
Things went badly off track in September during a typhoid outbreak in Delmas, blamed on groundwater pollution resulting from a lack of sanitation services. At least five people died of typhoid and close to 5Â 000 fell ill.
A recent national survey by the Water Research Commission found stoppages and clogging of municipal sewers in South Africa are about 10 times more frequent than the international average. More worrying, about 16-million people still live without running water and 231Â 000 households across the country use the bucket system for toilets.
Water provision and reallocation- are proceeding slowly. At least 3,5-million people have no access to safe water, and about 60% of local government is not adhering to water quality requirements. The minister estimates it will take seven years to reallocate water resources more equitably.
Setting up water catchment management authorities in the 19 identified areas is proceeding slowly, with, at most, two established. The redistribution of state-owned commercial forests to broad-based black economic empowerment interests took a knock when Komatiland Forests stopped supplying private timber mills in Mpumalanga, threatening at least 2Â 500 jobs.
Sonjica cannot be blamed for the extra pressures of drought, forest fires and climate change. The changes in her portfolio are constitutional mandates and she has to share her responsibilities with other portfolios. Her budgets are shrinking – the water services budget, for instance, will fall to around R400-million in 2007/08, from a high of R2 391-million in 2003/04.
She sees her role as focusing on a national water resource strategy, monitoring and regulation. By her own admission, she is struggling to get this to fit in with other levels of government, and to build up capacity. Can South Africa afford to wait?
Makhenkesi Stofile
Minister of Sport and Recreation
Grade: A (2004 B+)
Overseeing sport in South Africa is a double-edged sword. On the upside, it is a portfolio with considerable perks and few life-threatening decisions to make. And, with the president’s palpable lack of interest, decisions are unlikely to earn the incumbent too many withering looks at Cabinet meetings.
The downside is that Stofile has to deal with rugby – it’s difficult to think of another Cabinet minister who has regularly and publicly met so many unsavoury characters. To add to his problems, his brother, Mike, is one of those rugby officials.
While Jake White’s Springbok team has been winning friends and breaking larynxes around the world, the officials of the South African Rugby Union (Saru) have been indulging in their favourite sport – infighting.
After a half-hearted attempt to sort out the mess, Stofile wisely left them to it. In his second year in the post, he has realised that, like the Blue Bulls’ appearance in the Currie Cup final, the Saru bunfight is an annual affair.
His backing of the Eastern Cape in the race for the fifth Super 14 franchise was unsurprising – if unpopular – as he had been premier of the province. But saying South Africa should back New Zealand’s bid for the 2011 World Cup (after our own bid fell by the wayside) because of that country’s help during the struggle, was a deliberate knock-on. Note to the ministry: Japan (the only other candidate) was enforcing sanctions against South Africa when the All Blacks were still happily playing the Boks.
The minister has had a much more successful and productive year on other fronts. He has overseen the amalgamation of the Sports Commission and Nocsa into the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee – a process started late last year – eliminating the confusion that having two such bodies created, and has set about trying to get more funding for school sport. In a joint effort with the education department, he is attempting to get the piffling 35c spent on each pupil trebled.
This sensible but unsung focus on the grassroots, supporting initiatives that may not pay off for a decade or more, show Stofile is taking the long-term view, and is the main reason for his improved mark this year. Without rugby, he might even have got to the head of the class.
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang
Minister of Health
Grade: F (2004 C+ for general health, F- for HIV/Aids)
Look on her works, ye mighty (and more especially ye powerless), and despair. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has led the Department of Health further into the mire this year, with tentative signs of a resurgence in the moribund department obscured by highly public bad news.
Despite taking credit for pushing through the drafting of the Comprehensive Plan for the Management, Care and Treatment of HIV/Aids, the minister appears unenthusiastic about presiding over one of the world’s largest anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy programmes. Her ministry says she was forced into drug provision when “her rivals insisted on the immediate implementation of anti-retroviral treatment”.
Potential side effects of anti-retrovirals deeply worry Tshabalala-Msimang, who invited experts to lecture the National Health Council on their dangers and ineffectiveness. She has also said she is unhappy about the number of people on ARVs because she doesn’t know the level of toxicity. Doctors involved in the roll-out are concerned about lack of monitoring and evaluation, but, unlike the minister, don’t have the power to monitor the whole programme.
The monitoring vacuum is one example of the gaps in the department. Many national and provincial posts are vacant, and too often it is important technical, rather than administrative, positions that go unfilled.
The department waits until crisis- erupts: whether it be typhoid in Delmas, 22 babies dying of hospital–acquired infections at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial hospital, lack of ARV stocks, escalating private healthcare costs or legislative foul-ups. It then hits the “blame-someone-else-and-panic” button.
Despite her department’s incapacity, the minister seems willing to take on new responsibilities. Well-sourced rumours say the independence of the Medicines Control Council is under debate and that it may be pulled into the department.
The minister has remained a divisive rather than a unifying figure. Her private meetings with the controversial and litigious vitamin dealer Matthias Rath have reinforced the impression that she believes nutritional supplements are a substitute rather than a supplement for ARVs.
Eleven years into democracy, South Africa still has no comprehensive human resources plan for the health sector. Luring medical professionals from Tunisia and Russia and appealing to the patriotism of South Africans working abroad to come home are not sustainable solutions. The government hospitals are under strain, while private hospitals are underused. The Health Charter is intended to codify the responsibilities of stakeholders and align the public and private sectors to deliver healthcare as effectively as possibly. Yet the charter, a key commitment of 2004, remains unfinished.
The National Health Act of 2003 was partly implemented this year to replace apartheid-era legislation. But strategic parts of the Act were not brought into force because the department had not fully thought through crucial issues, such as certificates of need for doctors and medical facilities. The Constitutional Court finally gave a conditional nod to that veteran of many court battles, the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act of 1997. But the go-ahead came only after months of confusion over pharmacy fees.
There has been some good news, such as the development of the Risk Equalisation Fund, which aims to help vulnerable people access medical schemes. Also started this year was the Low Income Medical Scheme process, which should help several million poor people get medical scheme cover for out-of-pocket costs.
Marthinus van Schalkwyk
Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism
Grade: B (2004 B-)
Van Schalkwyk has had a busy, productive year. His main achievements include proclaiming two new national parks, banning asbestos and gazetting the Air Quality Act.
He has a knack for drawing in interest groups to help him deal with the bigger challenges in his portfolio, and for listening to them. Examples include the National Climate Change Conference, which brought together eight government ministries in October, and the panel of experts on hunting, which made some enlightened and broad-ranging recommendations to reform the industry.
Not much has been heard from the National Environmental Advisory Forum, an intermediary between civil society and government set up by the minister in February.
The Marine and Coastal Management division has settled down since being restructured in April, though transformation of fishing rights is proving tricky. The country’s first National Spatial Biodiversity Assessment identified which areas need the most protection, including 12% of marine bio-zones.
A process of identifying and cleaning up pollution hot spots started in September, with the launch of the Air Quality Act. But it will take at least two years to get a national framework in place to manage and enforce air quality.
Van Schalkwyk is playing an active role in talks on climate change, but interventions are few. As Democratic Alliance spokesperson Gareth Morgan pointed out in a parliamentary address in June, “passing laws is the easy part, implementing them is far more difficult”.
The department is investing R193-million in transfrontier conservation initiatives this year and is spending more than R296-million on poverty relief projects that marry job creation and tourism infrastructure development.
Transfrontier development is a major push in anticipation of the 2010 Football World Cup, and Van Schalkwyk has spent a fair time negotiating with Southern African Development Community counterparts on this. He aims to grow tourism in South Africa by between 1,8% and 2,1% this year.
Major challenges looming in the near future include decisions on how to regulate the hunting industry and whether to cull elephants. Controversy around the proposed Wild Coast toll road and pebble bed modular reactors has resurfaced, and in both instances, the department has insisted on new environmental impact assessments. Whichever way the process goes, Van Schalkwyk is likely to come in for criticism.
AWOL
Brigitte Mabandla
Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development
When the Mail & Guardian last assessed Mabandla, we condoned her performance on the grounds that she had been in the job for just more than six months. Her tenure is now 18 months old, sufficient time to stamp her authority on her portfolio. She still seems to be groping forward, without much authority or confidence.
Amid an unprecedented row over alleged racism in the Cape legal profession, she failed to provide political or moral leadership, leaving Chief Justice Pius Langa to try to sort out the mess. Tensions between black and white legal practitioners continue to simmer.
While the Scorpions might have expected support from the ministry under which they currently fall, Mabandla told the Khampepe commission she favoured their incorporation into the police. She reasoned that the unit had reached their sell-by date because “there had been a real decline in the levels of some of the serious crimes that have caused public fear and anxiety”.
The department also suffered the embarrassment of having to placate magistrates intent on striking because the department had broken its promise of car allowances as a way of improving their salary packages. Only in December did they finally receive what they had been offered.
A further disappointment was Mabandla’s failure to kick-start the long-stalled Sexual Offences Bill.
Mabandla’s most crucial test will be potentially explosive legislation regulating the judiciary, essentially put together by her deputy, Johnny de Lange. Two Bills have been approved by the Cabinet, but have not yet been tabled and their contents are still unknown.
The judges objected strongly to some of the original legislative proposals, arguing that they made executive inroads into the independence of the judiciary.
AWOL
Membathisi Mdladlana
Minister of Labour
It has not been a particularly good year for Mdladlana, who has either been invisible or mired in controversy.
He is a rather bumptious person, given to shooting his mouth off. His most visible intervention was as head of South Africa’s observer mission to Zimbabwe, when he declared the election free and fair before it took place. Questioned on this pronouncement by journalists, he responded: “I was born in a small town. There we only know the customs of the Dlaminis and cannot speak about the customs of the Radebes.”
The Labour Department came under criticism in April for spending more than R44-million on a skills development conference when, critics insisted, R1-million would have been excessive. Instead of taking responsibility, the minister suspended his deputy director general, Adrian Bird, for misusing government funds.
Through skills development, Mdladlana’s department is pivotal to the government’s target of halving poverty by 2014.
Mdladlana boasts that the target of 80Â 000 people in learnerships over the past five years has been exceeded, but statistics shows that only a tiny proportion have successfully completed the programme. The sector education and training authorities (Setas) failed to spend more than R2-billion earmarked for skills development last year.
Mdladlana has also not filled long-standing vacancies in his own department. According to the 2004 auditor general’s report, vacancies in excess of 20% persist in many areas, particularly statistics and programme management.
The high vacancy rate is underscored by the department’s extensive reliance on outside experts – the minister recently lambasted his officials for spending millions on consultants.
AWOL
Mandisi Mpahlwa
Minister of Trade and Industry
Mpahlwa kept a low profile when he was deputy finance minister, but he has been practically invisible as Minister of Trade and Industry.
The national Treasury has been quietly bumped from its position at the centre of the debate, and industrial policy has elbowed its way onto the stage, trailing footnotes to development economists like Dani Rodrick.
With Alan Hirsch, a former departmental mandarin, running the economic policy unit in the presidency, perhaps it is not surprising that the things Mpahlwa’s department is supposed to manage – such as industrial support schemes and efforts to keep the prices of key input low – are now being touted as the answer to higher growth rates.
So why isn’t Mpahlwa evident in the vanguard?
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has been given custodianship of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (Asgi, perhaps the most infelicitous acronym in the government’s alphabet soup) for what seem largely to be political reasons.
And one of Mpahlwa’s two deputies, Rob Davies, is charged with leading the industrial policy side of the plan. He also seems to be doing most of the talking on trade issues.
Has that freed up Mpahlwa to focus on development finance institutions – an area where he has real expertise? Apparently not. While the Industrial Development Corporation ticks along, the National Empowerment Fund, Apex Fund and Khula seem stuck in a period of reorganisation and consolidation.
Has he instead focused on trade negotiations? If so, it isn’t clear. This is an area in which South Africa, under that canniest of negotiators, Alec Erwin, had real prestige. As the faltering Doha development round stumbled on in Hong Kong, developing-world leadership came from India, Brazil and China.
Mpahlwa’s profile suffers in part because he has one of the least effective communications departments in the Cabinet, but also because his department is under-resourced and not fully recovered from the legacy of its former director general, Alistair Ruiters. Perhaps he has spent the year getting his ducks in a row. We hope so, because next year a good deal more will be expected of him.
Away on leave
Stella Sigcau
Minister of Public Works
B+ (for her team)
Visibly weakened with a heart ailment, Sigcau spent a large proportion of the year on sick leave. When she made public appearances, it was to cajole business into assisting with the public works programme; and she spent a lot of time in the places she loves best – the rural backwaters of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
The rest of the Public Works department then deserves credit for a year well-spent. For starters, the department received its first ever unqualified audit.
Sigcau’s team also completed the audit of the state’s huge property portfolio and put a figure to the maintenance backlog. The reason that police stations, Home Affairs and our courts are in such a shoddy state is because of this backlog. It will cost R12,5-billion to pull things straight and next year, Sigcau will request R2,5-billion a year from her finance counterpart, Manuel.
Team “Stella” also claims the expanded public works programme is on track to meet its target of creating a million job opportunities between 2004 and 2009. In the first quarter of this year, 60Â 000 opportunities were created, with 174Â 000 in 2004.
But it’s worth remembering that an EPWP “job opportunity” lasts an average of four months and pays about R600 a month. Does it really make a dent in unemployment, we have to ask ourselves? What else has Public Works done? It is far ahead of other departments in weeding out front companies who compete for government work. The Scorpions are probing 63 companies, which a Public Works probe found had created fronts to qualify for black economic empowerment (BEE) work. The department’s also spearheaded BEE charters in property and construction; Sigcau pushes and supports women-owned companies in the sector.
But the fight between public works and education about who is responsible for more efficient school-building continues.
PARTY LEADERS
Mangosuthu Buthelezi
President of the Inkatha Freedom Party
Grade: F
After more than 50 years in politics, it is time for Buthelezi to ride into the sunset.
He is an astute politician, but his attempts to cling on to power are increasingly undermining his party. For the sake of both the IFP – the party he started more than 30 years ago – and opposition politics, Buthelezi should make way for young blood and fresh ideas.
Party chairperson and revisionist Ziba Jiyane attempted to do this but was squeezed out of the party by Buthelezi, who on several occasions accused him of being “deeply manipulative” and planning to take the IFP into the ANC fold. The election of Zanele Magwaza, the mayor of the Zululand district municipality and a slavish Buthelezi loyalist, as the IFP’s new national chairperson has pushed the party further into a cul de sac of ethnic chauvinism and the politics of patronage.
Buthelezi has surrounded himself with yea-sayers, instead of infusing the party with a culture of debate and modernism and redrafting the IFP’s outdated policies to suit the times.
The party, which boasted a million members in the mid-1980s, is now a flicker of its former self and no longer a serious contender for power, even in KwaZulu-Natal. Since 1994, the IFP has shed 50% of its voter support and has experienced an almost total rejection by voters in eight of the nine provinces. Over the same period, it lost 40% of its Zulu support.
Buthelezi’s insistence that he is “revising” the party is as fraudulent as his promises that he has built a party that “cares”. Most of the IFP-run municipalities are managed like fiefdoms with scant regard for service delivery.
With limited political leverage in KwaZulu-Natal legislature and local government, the IFP was mauled in the floor-crossing feeding frenzy. It lost five of its national MPs and three of its provincial legislature members.
The IFP youth brigade leadership, with the exception of brigade chairperson and Buthelezi loyalist Thulasizwe Buthelezi, left the party this year.
Buthelezi has also shown scant leadership in the squabble between the IFP and the ANC over the adoption of a constitution for KwaZulu-Natal, which has regressed into an ethnic slanging match.
PARTY LEADERS
Patricia de Lille
Independent Democrats leader
Grade: D
Once touted as a brave new force in non-racial opposition politics, Patricia de Lille is looking increasingly vulnerable.
Her struggle with the ID’s ex-Western Cape leader Max Lennit did not go her way: during this year’s floor-crossing, he was able to take his provincial legislature seat to the Democratic Alliance. The DA, concerned about potential ID inroads in its white and coloured voter base, particularly in the Western Cape, gloated.
Also lost to the party were two of the ID’s seven MPs. In the Western Cape legislature, De Lille’s sister, Sarah Paulse, is the sole ID representative left following September’s defection period. It also lost its only seat in the National Council of Provinces. All round, a blood-letting!
Two years after its formation during the 2003 defection period, when De Lille left the Pan-Africanist Congress, the ID been hit by ego clashes, organisational conflict and internal battles over policy direction. Having criticised the DA for knee-jerk opposition to the government, it now appears uncertain about what kind of opposition to offer. Once a fierce critic of the African National Congress, De Lille has become much less visible.
De Lille has been warned about taking bad advice from those she keeps close to her. In the cases of both Lennit Max, the ex-policeman she had hoped to turn into an effective politician, and Themba Sono, the former Gauteng ID leader, she chose to ignore the cautions.
But no one can accuse her of lacking determination. The ID plans to field local government election candidates in all six metropolitan areas and in towns across all nine provinces. It has vowed to go it alone: there will not be alliances or coalitions.
The elections will be a crucial test of whether the ID has a real future or whether, like the United Democratic Movement, it is a flash in the pan. Its biggest draw card remains De Lille herself.
PARTY LEADERS
Tony Leon
Democratic Alliance leader
Grade: C
To Leon’s credit, his party has fulfilled its opposition role in Parliament, being vocal on every issue despite the ruling party trying hard to pretend it does not exist. The Oilgate scandal was an example of an issue which the ANC hoped would quietly disappear, but which was kept alive by the DA and other opposition parties, together with the media.
And despite the emergence of the Independent Democrats and other parties pitching for the white, coloured and Indian vote, Leon has largely held the DA’s traditional support base. But the fact remains that it is a 13% political party that appears to have hit its ceiling.
This year it suffered an image-tarnishing cross-over of senior black MPs to the ANC. The DA has been content to portray the defectors as ambitious careerists solely concerned with using the ANC to climb the greasy pole. But there seems to have been little attempt to look inwards and acknowledge that the party’s culture is not welcoming to black recruits.
To all appearances, Leon continues to enjoy the full backing of his party. But DA supporters who understand that minority-based politics is a cul de sac are beginning to look at national MP and Cape Town mayor candidate Helen Zille as a potential leader.
The ANC appears more vulnerable than ever at local level, but it is far from clear that the DA will be able to exploit this in the local government elections. If it fails significantly to improve its fortunes, Leon should ask himself whether it is time to let go of the reins.
Back to part one of the report card