Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel and Minister of Science and Technology Mosibudi Mangena are the government’s top 2006 performers, while Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang continues to languish at the bottom of the class, according to the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) end-of-year Cabinet report card.
The document, launched by DA leader Tony Leon at a media briefing in Cape Town on Wednesday, gives Manuel seven out of 10 on its performance scale — one point down on last year, but high enough to leave him way ahead of many of his colleagues.
It credits the finance minister with having the best-run department in government, and pays tribute to the ”general sense of balance” it says he has displayed towards his tasks.
Mangena, who also scored seven, is praised in the report for actively seeking new opportunities to develop South Africa’s technological capacity.
The report gives President Thabo Mbeki a ”middling five”, for the third year in a row. It says the president has shown little of the strong purposeful leadership required to head off many of South Africa’s pressing problems.
His deputy, however, earned herself six-and-a-half points, thanks largely, says the DA, to her achievement in ”negotiating a turnabout on the government’s unforgivable foot-dragging on HIV/Aids”.
The report says Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has ”brought an admirable realism to bear on the issue” of Aids, but warns the jury is still out on her leadership of government’s Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative.
The report deals harshly with Tshabalala-Msimang’s performance, which Leon described as ”a perfect zero”.
”As with last year, it has proved to be impossible to find anything good to say about Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, and she again scores nought.
”The DA can only say that it hopes reports of her side-lining have not been exaggerated, and that by next year we will have a more able appointment to evaluate,” it states.
Low-scoring Cabinet members, who all scored a scant two out of 10, include Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana and Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula.
The report says the latter achieved notoriety this year for ”a lack of openness and transparency, a generally contemptuous and arrogant approach to the public, and his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of South Africa’s crime problems”.
Despite repeated requests, Nqakula had also refused to lift an unofficial moratorium on quarterly crime statistics.
Mapisa-Nqakula is strongly criticised for ”another year of pandemonium” in her department.
”It has become patently obvious [she] is not up to the job of managing this complex and increasingly rickety institution.”
Leon said her department was an ”absolute nightmare”, and the bulk of complaints about government sent to the DA had to do with people’s battle to obtain identity documents and passports.
The report says Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk has ”not shown much of a sense of urgency” in deciding how the government should respond to the threat of global warning.
It endorses a view he is a political lightweight, ”unable to press for environmental considerations to take precedence over development”, and scores him a five, one point down on last year.
According to the report, Cabinet’s average score for the year is 4,3, down on last year’s 4,5, and the five points earned in 2004. — Sapa