Who scores a D for leadership? Whose strength is her frankness? Whose department did move to clean up some of the mess of past years in 2006? Who is a pragmatist either in hiding or deluded about the power of the state? The Mail & Guardian presents its yearly, no-holds-barred Cabinet report card.
This is part one of our Cabinet report card. Click here to read part two
Thabo Mbeki
President
Grade: A- (governance); D (leadership)
President Mbeki’s grading reflects the dichotomy of the man. On the one hand, he is a strong manager and a good governor. On the other, he is a weakened and angry leader given to outbursts like the one earlier this month in which he (again) declared that those (unionists, newspapers and politicians) who complained about cronyism were part of an undemocratic alliance.
Governance
There are serious deficits in various parts of the state, especially in crucial areas such as education (where standards are static if not in decline) and employment (where jobs are not being created nearly fast enough to sop up the masses without work).
Mbeki runs a tight ship but some aspects, such as asserting better control and standards over the provinces, where most health and education spending occurs, is a hard task. To view how Mbeki governs and to see the system he’s developed, it’s worth a visit to the programme of action where the state sets out its plans.
It’s worth keeping an eye on and is key to our grading. As the year ended, he completed a number of crucial areas. The black empowerment laws are now in final, albeit imperfect, form; there is a growth strategy with focus on biofuels and call centres as sustainable sectors that could be labour intensive. Much of Mbeki’s year has been spent seeking to support the stepchild of governance: the municipalities.
This year growth rates hit the sweet spot and the boom has not ended despite the hawkish monetary policies of Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni. The stock market went delirious this year though the gini coefficient (the measure of the wealth gap) is static.
Mbeki has been less strong on criminal justice to the great detriment of the country. Crime is fast rising as a key concern of all South Africans, even beginning to outstrip jobs and housing. It is for this that he is downgraded from a potential A to A-.
He has, as usual, played a strong foreign policy hand this year, augmenting alliances and relationships with the new giants: India and China. As the head of the G77, Mbeki was an outspoken leader.
The election in the Democratic Republic of Congo was also a feather in Mbeki’s cap as he has worked quite tirelessly for the rule of the ballot instead of the bullet in the Central African nation.
Leadership
At home, Mbeki scores a D for leadership. At the end of the year he declared that the image of him as an ”angry black man” was not one he recognised when he looked at the mirror. Really? Look again, Mr President.
After a well-received Nelson Mandela lecture in July at which he decried the culture of ”Get rich, get rich, get rich”, he hit out at those who have pointed out that many politicians are getting rich from the country’s biggest post-apartheid infrastructure project, the Gautrain.
Last year already Mbeki began to lose his grip on power when the national general council revolted against him for firing his deputy, Jacob Zuma. This year, he walked further up lame-duck avenue; his youth league is in revolt against him; so are the allied forces of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, both of which have gone into open warfare against any attempts by Mbeki to anoint his own successor or, indeed, to hold fast to power by making himself available for a third term as party president.
Mbeki ended the year in vintage style. While Zuma thought the coast was clear for his candidate in the Eastern Cape (the party’s most powerful province), the president worked behind the scenes to ensure his own man took the crown. He’s been doing the same thing in other swing provinces.
All’s fair in love and politics, but it would do Mbeki more good to drop the third-term attempt, leave the African National Congress (ANC) to muddle its way out of this succession debate and consolidate his legacy so that he can use his ample geopolitical nous to get a job on the world stage when he quits in 2009.
Ngconde Balfour
Minister of Correctional Services
Grade: E (2005 D)
Under Balfour, correctional services has continued its downward spiral. In the year that the Jali commission finally released its report on corruption and maladministration in prisons, he has done little to cauterise systematic rot in his department.
Jali found prisons suffered from a cavalier attitude towards discipline as a result of poor management, with the result that officials guilty of gross misconduct were retained in the system. In place of systemic reform, Balfour seems to think chest-beating rhetoric and grandstanding are the remedy.
His officials insisted that by the time the Jali report was released, they had already implemented 60% of its recommendations. Remedial action does not appear to cover the critical issues of prison gangs, rape and other crime within prison walls, and chronic overcrowding.
The department adopted an anti-corruption strategy that resulted in a 33% increase in reporting of graft. Whether this is to be considered a success or a failure depends on one’s perspective.
Balfour’s performance was not helped by his now-departed director general, Linda Mti.
The escape of Annanias Mathe; the cushy jail conditions of former ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni and the alleged privileged treatment of Schabir Shaik all combined to make this a difficult year for the minister.
Thoko Didiza
Minister of Public Works
Grade: C (2005 C+)
Didiza was transferred from land affairs in the May Cabinet reshuffle to breathe some life into the public works portfolio, previously under the ineffectual Stella Sigcau and now of far greater importance as the lead ministry in the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). Mbeki wanted a new leader to drive the programme and widen a labour-intensive job-creating approach to as many government projects as possible.
Mbeki outlined clear targets for the programme: a million jobs in five years. The department says it has delivered 300Â 000 ”work opportunities” — temporary jobs — in two years.
The programme’s obvious shortcomings are that the work it provides is short-term and wages are very low. But in the long term, the intention is to impart skills to the unskilled, who are then better placed for other work or self-employment. What the government does not say is how many of those who have passed though the EPWP are still in jobs.
One of Didiza’s strengths is her frankness: she concedes that she herself remains unsure about whether the programme can dent the jobless figures.
Didiza’s department is also responsible for maintaining public buildings and has been engaged in recent months in an audit of state property. In August it completed a plan for the maintenance of general public infrastructure, and it has succeeded in spending most of its allocation for construction.
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Grade: B- (2005 C)
With a capable team of deputy ministers and a director general on the one side and a president with a clear interest in foreign relations on the other, it is hard to identify what the minister herself brings to the table. Some attribute South Africa’s critical role in structures like the Non-Aligned Movement to Dlamini-Zuma’s dynamism, while others describe her as a ”glorified messenger”.
But most people we spoke to view her as a politically astute minister at the head of a highly ambitious department, who is well-received in foreign countries.
Her weakness is said to be her lack of people skills and recently her judgement was contradicted when the high court upheld a verdict finding former South African ambassador to Indonesia Norman Mashabane guilty of sexual harassment.
American ambassador Eric Bost also lashed out at the department with a public complaint that the United States’s significant monetary contribution would not buy him the kind of access he expected. His remarks reportedly echo the sentiments of other foreign diplomats and the minister is said to have done little to raise the department’s profile or goodwill.
But the department has also seen its fair share of successes. Two rounds of successful elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo are widely regarded as a feather in South Africa’s cap. Setbacks in Côte d’Ivoire are not regarded as the fault of South Africa but of regional politics.
South Africa continued this year to punch above its weight, playing a high-profile role in engaging Iran on its nuclear programme and participating actively in the United Nations. Yet while it pursues issues of global importance, the department has many other matters, closer to home, which it has failed to address adequately; such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.
Alec Erwin
Minister of Public Enterprises
Grade: B- (2005 B-)
What is one to make of Erwin? Is he a French-style dirigiste, inherently mistrustful of private capital, and much too eager to pour vast tranches of public money into national champions of industry? Or is he a pragmatist, who thinks markets are powerful and necessary, but sometimes lack the vision that governments can supply?
If you ask him directly, he will, of course, give you the second answer.
If the mega investment at Coega was such a stupid idea, he will suggest, just look how well Richards Bay is doing thanks to far-sighted government spending, and if you don’t like the prices charged by Mittal Steel, imagine what South African companies would be paying if he had allowed Iscor to die.
There are plenty of grounds for case-by-case argument with Erwin, but you have to give him this: he was appointed two-and-a-half years ago to whip the state’s portfolio of companies into shape so that they could serve as delivery vehicles for a massive round of infrastructure investment, and he has made substantial progress.
Certainly, his department has considerably tightened up its own capacity to monitor the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and they have largely followed suit.
Transnet, under Maria Ramos, has made the most dramatic progress. Meanwhile, Eskom — a company with immense resources — seems to be aligning itself more closely with the ministry’s policy priorities than perhaps it has in the past. It remains to be seen whether an industrial policy based on cheap energy will make sense as generation capacity struggles to keep up with demand. Certainly Koeberg’s woes, and Erwin’s embarrassment of claims of sabotage at the nuclear plant, have taken the gloss off what was once the clear leader among SOEs.
Strangely enough Erwin’s hand, elsewhere so strong on the tiller, seems to falter when it comes to South African Airways, where Khaya Ngqakula continues to demonstrate that the only strategies he understands are cost cutting and accounting legerdemain.
In the sprawling disaster area that is Denel, new management with firm political backing from the minister and lashings of taxpayer money seems to be tightening controls and making the right choices.
Similar question marks hang over the decision to turn the Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor company into an SOE, and to set up a new state-owned Broadband company, Infraco.
In these instances — and, we would argue, Denel — Erwin’s dirigiste character is to the fore, and the pragmatist is either in hiding or deluded about the power of the state.
Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi
Minister of Public Service and Administration
Grade: B- (2005 B)
There is little glamour in the public service portfolio, but Fraser-Moleketi has plugged away at it for seven years with some success.
Hers is a watchdog department whose primary concern is with the structure of the state. Her vision is of a modern, efficient bureaucracy with improved leadership and technological infrastructure.
She is described as a focused minister who listens to critics but also has a clear idea of where she wants her sluggish department to go. One success has been reduced levels of labour conflict in a strike-prone sector — there have been no sector-wide disputes in three years.
Fraser-Moleketi is toiling away at forging a single public service from three tiers of government, a task set for completion by 2009.
She was responsible for South Africa’s self-evaluation for its African Union peer review, and claimed that up to five million people, including civil society, business and other stakeholders, were closely consulted. She was shocked by the negative assessment of the country by the country’s peers, which highlighted crime as a major concern.
Critics complain that she has not done enough to root out corruption among state officials. But her department did complete a compliance audit on the implementation of the Public Service Anti-Corruption Strategy.
The minister’s Achilles heel remains the skills shortage in the public sector. In the 26 national departments, there is an average vacancy rate of 10%.
Lindiwe Hendricks
Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry
Grade: B
Six months after Hendricks took over the helm in May, she received a boost when the UN Development Programme said South Africa’s water provision roll-out was a model for other countries. The UN praised the country’s reduction in water backlogs to 17%, and the ”lifeline” programme that provides indigent households with a free basic six kilolitres of water a month. Civil society complains that the free allocation amounts to a few toilet flushes a day per person, that cut-offs are not taken into account and that water pricing leaves many homes waterless.
In early November, she launched the long-awaited Inkomati Catchment Management Agency, the first of 19 agencies countrywide. The catchment agencies would assist in conserving water, managing demand and reducing water wastage in local authorities.
According to her department, 15-million people have received access to water since 1994, and 19,2-million poor people are receiving the free monthly water allocation. Sanitation backlogs have been reduced from 52% to 31%, according to official figures.
It will be a difficult juggling act, as Hendricks’s department is redefining itself as a regulator, supporter and leader of the water, sanitation and forestry sectors, rather than a mere policy maker.
She also faces the daunting task of righting her department’s financial woes — five successive years of qualified audit reports and the suspension of the previous chief financial officer while he is investigated. The department has a 33% vacancy rate.
Another challenge is finalising the forestry charter, so that transformation benefits the rural poor. Hendricks undertook to finalise a broad-based black economic empowerment charter for forestry by the end of this year, but unresolved land claims have proved an obstacle.
Zweledinga Pallo Jordan
Minister of Arts and Culture
Rating: C+ (2005 C-)
Jordan’s department did move to clean up some of the mess of past years in 2006 and made some effort to consult the sector.
In the first quarter of 2007 the largely discredited Director General, Itumeleng Mosala, whose three-year tenure comes to an end and whose job has been advertised, will mercifully be replaced. This should mean a better climate in the department’s Pretoria offices, where staff have been vociferous in their criticism of the DG. The appointment in August of the new National Arts Council (NAC) could, in the long term, breathe new life into the stagnating pool of arts funding. Arts practitioners linked to theatre companies complain of funding delays as a hangover from instability at the NAC.
In the film sector, Jordan has been criticised for the late release of resolutions taken at his African Film Summit in April.
Still unresolved is the issue of the unallocated R82-million available to the arts and culture sector from the lotteries fund, which can only be addressed at ministerial level in conjunction with the Trade and Industry Department.
The minister also needs to move on recommendations flowing from the national imbizo (meeting) in the provinces over the past two years, including KwaZulu-Natal in April and Mpumalanga in October. Observers link this to the need for a review of overall policy, which has seen no redraft since the White Paper of 1996.
Ronnie Kasrils
Minister of Intelligence
Grade: A- (2005 A-)
Kasrils deserves praise for stabilising the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) after the sacking of former director general Billy Masetlha and other top NIA officials during the hoax e-mail saga last year.
He and the NIA appear to have survived the departures, despite some poor legal advice — but the slightly pathetic criminal cases against Masetlha and the internal party wrangling over the e-mails may still deliver some nasty shocks.
The agency is just emerging from the paralysis engendered by that upheaval. The appointment of three new deputy directors, Maggie Modipa, Arthur Fraser and Pete Ritcher, will bolster the Director General, Manala Manzini. Ritcher’s experience at the South African Revenue Service, in particular, should help the NIA focus on organised crime.
While Kasrils has had considerable success in cutting personnel costs and creating resources for operations, ways still need to be found to create greater public accountability for intelligence spending.
Asked about the NIA’s operational successes in the past year, the ministry could only refer to the award of service medals relating to operations ”ranging from disrupting the activities of transnational criminal syndicates engaged in smuggling and money laundering activities, to foiling a plot directed at destabilising a neighbouring country, to exposing individuals engaged in espionage”.
Opposition parties seem satisfied with the financial and policy oversight they exercise in Parliament’s standing committee on intelligence, though they emphasise that they have no operational oversight.
The inspector general’s office, meant to monitor our spies in action, was somewhat exposed by the Masetlha affair, but the ministry says important lessons have been learned and additional specialised personnel have been appointed.
The ministry also claims a visible improvement in the quality of the analysis provided to clients.
Steps have been taken to address problems at the South African National Academy of Intelligence and there are plans to deal with massive backlogs in security vetting for state employees.
Mosiuoa Lekota
Minister of Defence
Grade: D (2005 D+)
What is to be done about defence, which appears to be undergoing a process of slow, steady decline? Lekota should resign, for a start. The minister has been treading water and should give way to somebody with energy and commitment.
While media reports of the military’s problems in keeping track of its equipment in Burundi might have been somewhat overblown, the fact is the department received a qualified audit for the fifth straight year.
The defence force’s laudable peacekeeping missions have this year again been marred by incidents of ill-discipline. Skills have continued to bleed away, particularly in the medical service and the air force. The recent embarrassing (and expensive) problem of a shortage of pilots to fly the deputy president around is one of the consequences — though slight progress has been made on the filling of vacancies in other areas.
Many of the shiny new military toys purchased under the controversy-racked arms procurement will be underused because of a lack of skilled personnel and a shortage of other resources needed to operate them.
Military combat-readiness remains low and maintenance of existing systems and infrastructure is inadequate.
And as the Democratic Alliance points out, the national conventional arms-control committee, which operates under Lekota, has not reported to Parliament for two years.
Brigitte Mabandla
Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development
Grade: G (2005 AWOL)
It was another low-profile — perhaps ”invisible” might be more accurate — year for Mabandla. Last year she dropped below the radar, conspicuously failing to provide leadership amid racial squabbling among judges, but was condoned as a relative newcomer. This year, she has again been weak and anonymous. Her biggest blue has been effectively to abdicate her lawmaking responsibilities to her deputy, Johnny de Lange — with disastrous consequences.
Mabandla was forced to eat humble pie after President Thabo Mbeki shelved the Superior Courts Bill and the draft Constitution 14th Amendment Bill, after a local and international outcry over their perceived inroads into judicial independence. The legislation aimed at regulating the judiciary and giving the presidency the power to appoint the most senior judges.
Though essentially a defeat for the over-zealous De Lange, the saga raised questions about Mabandla’s stewardship. At least the Sexual Offences Bill was finally passed.
In the battle over the destiny of the Scorpions, Mabandla threw her weight behind police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi’s demands for the agency’s absorption into the police — misreading the key political significance of keeping it independent.
A point in Mabandla’s favour is that she has championed the Transformation Charter for the legal professions. But judges complain that she makes all the right noises, for example about conditions of service, but has yet to produce the goods from treasury and the public works. Her mouth might be in the right place, but on a range of issues the money is somewhere else.
Mosibudi Mangena
Minister of Science and Technology
Grade: A+ (2005 A)
While learning to be a Cabinet minister it seems Mangena missed several popular courses. He is not well-versed in freeloading, being fashionably late or flying by chartered jet to foreign destinations. He is also not too good at surrounding himself with belligerent bodyguards, having public tiffs with organisations under his control or sounding off on subjects beyond his remit.
What he does excel at, however, is being a hands-on minister with a thorough knowledge of his department and the projects it oversees. Mangena is an austere and thoughtful individual who has reorganised the ministry into one of the most effective in the government.
His portfolio basically revolves around two goals: creating the right environment to promote science and technology innovation in South Africa, and training more scientists through better-aligned education policies.
In bolstering science and technology he has reintroduced the concept of mission-driven innovation, which led, in the past, to breakthroughs such as Sasol’s oil-from-coal technology.
A further arm of his strategy is to trade on South Africa’s location. ”Geographical advantage” allowed South Africa to be short-listed this year for the €1,5-billion Square Kilometre Array telescope.
Observers were impressed with the way he handled the parastatals — the Human Sciences Research Council and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research — that fall under his ministry. Apart from receiving clean audit reports, the two councils also continued to produce impressive research.
The minister also took a personal interest in the highly rated National Innovation Fund, which funds South Africans science projects and helps them develop and patent new products.
He also appears to be on track to meet his own ambitious target of investing 1% of South Africa’s GDP in research and development by 2008.
Mangena’s biggest challenge remains that of nurturing South African scientists from the problematic school system, with its maths and science shortcomings. He has initiated the Dinaledi programme, which has launched 102 specialist schools for maths and science, while also developing a national network of centres for out-of-school science programmes.
Trevor Manuel
Minister of Finance
Grade: A (2005 A+)
Manuel would be justified in boasting that a combination of political savvy, managerial aptitude, charisma and sheer bloody-mindedness have won him unprecedented room to make fiscal choices.
We are in a strange new world, where budgets are balanced even as spending increases approach double figures.
But other government departments just can’t come up with coherent, realistic plans fast enough to catch up with tax revenues boosted by sustained economic growth and an ever more efficient collection system.
So we are paying down debt, scaling back bond purchases and laying an even firmer foundation for the day when the macroeconomic environment turns grim. There is a good chance of that happening, as Manuel reminds us regularly.
Our budget, however, is well insulated from that kind of shock. Which is not to say Manuel is battening down the hatches. On the contrary, spending on health, infrastructure, social welfare and education is all sharply up. In fact, as he pointed out in a recent speech, social spending in South Africa outstrips that of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian workers’ paradise.
So it’s hard to argue with his current approach — but there are caveats.
The first and easiest to deal with is that Manuel is not entirely resisting the temptation, or the political pressure, to approve large sums of money for infrastructure projects with no discernible economic development rationale: the Gautrain, the 2010 World Cup and the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor come to mind.
The second is the altogether trickier question of maintaining political leadership in the economic development in South Africa, which means much more than being the boss of his own portfolio.
There is a distracting and unnecessary tug-of-love on between the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry, Public Enterprises and the Presidency over how to take the next step in building the prosperity of this country. Manuel is winning many of the battles surrounding the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, but he shouldn’t have to defer to Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Mandisi Mpahlwa or Alec Erwin on questions that he and his staff understand far better. Nor should he have to tip-toe around the failures of crucial portfolios like minerals and energy, where serious damage is being done to the productive base of the economy.
Certainly his reluctance to make a louder noise needs to be seen in the context of the brutal war over the future of his party.
Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula
Minister of Home Affairs
Grade: F (2005 D+)
Mapisa-Nqakula’s Department of Home Affairs is in embarrassing disarray.
The traditional malaise of bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption and fraud by department officials continues — the latter put sharply in focus by the recent Special Assignment exposé where journalists, together with a Zimbabwean national, successfully bought South African birth certificates and identity documents from six different home affairs offices around the country. An audit of illegal ID documents is expected in the new year.
The department revealed recently that 160 government officials had been dismissed since July last year, while a further 600 cases were being investigated.
Yet this seems an impotent deterrent. On the minister’s high-priority list should be the following:
- dealing with fraud; R40-billion in white-collar fraud was committed using false IDs, according to the South African fraud-protection services, yet the smart card system is still not working;
- she needs a new DG and a top team: home affairs received a qualified audit for the fourth consecutive year;
- 1,5-million people (6% of the population) need IDs;
- the asylum system is ”overburdened to the point of crisis”; the anti-xenophobia programme needs a boost; the Immigration Advisory Board is dysfunctional; and
- a highly controversial draft law, the Film and Publications Board Amendment Bill, comes to Parliament next year.
Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri
Minister of Communications
Grade: E (2005 D)
South Africans are still paying through the nose for telecoms and broadband services, while Matsepe-Casaburri sticks to her guns, touting managed liberalisation as the answer to our woes. While most stakeholders and commentators see increased competition as the answer to exorbitant telecoms costs, MatsepeÂCasaburri has stuck to the government line that competition needs to be introduced gradually and tied in with delivery to under-serviced areas.
Little surprise then that the minister was running neck and neck with Telkom for the hotly contested ”33.6 Kbps Modem Award” presented by consumer activists MyADSL to the organisation or individual who posed the biggest obstacle to development in the broadband arena over the last year.
For years, there have been calls for decisive action such as the unbundling of Telkom’s local loop and the regulation of bottlenecks, including the interconnection regime and Telkom’s monopoly of landing rights for the SAT-3 undersea submarine cable. Yet the minister has targeted the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) and its independence. After Mbeki dealt her meddling a blow by rejecting the Icasa Amendment Bill, which placed the responsibility for appointing Icasa councillors in her hands, the ANC-dominated parliamentary portfolio committee short-listed two current and one former department of communications officials as candidates.
Meanwhile, Icasa is haemorrhaging experienced staff, undermining its ability to regulate the sector and stimulate competition, leaving existing operators to make hay while the sun shines.
We may have new legislation in the form of the Electronic Communications Act and a second national operator in the form of Neotel, but there are still far too many impediments to competition and price reduction. The policy vacuum in the department is the obstacle. If any sector needs a 21st-century minister, communications does.
This is part one of our Cabinet report card. Click here to read part two