President Jacob Zuma is talking tough these days, not just about succession but about ministerial performance as well. He’s even got the ANC to rally behind him as he takes to the treacherous road of examining in detail what each minister has been up to since May when he was widely commended for having appointed a balanced and talented Cabinet.
Tough questions now have to be asked about his government’s performance since then. Forget the Sonono love child, the failure to declare assets, the Malema irritations — the fundamental question now being asked is: what has Zuma achieved since he became president 10 months ago?
His Cabinet is a mixture of continuity (from the presidencies of Kgalema Motlanthe and Thabo Mbeki) and fresh faces that include Aaron Motsoaledi, the minister of health, Collins Chabane, the minister in the presidency, and leftists such as Ebrahim Patel, Jeremy Cronin and Blade Nzimande.
After Zuma’s first State of the Nation address last year, his ministers declined to hold media briefings, saying they were not ready because they were still familiarising themselves with their portfolios.
This year the ministers came, they saw, but they hardly conquered.
The infrastructure cluster in Cabinet announced that it was developing the biggest infrastructure programme in the southern hemisphere. Chairing the cluster, Barbara Hogan, the minister of public enterprises, said there was a massive building programme in energy, telecommunications and water infrastructure, and that her cluster was key to driving the country on to a new developmental path in which job creation would be a priority.
So the cluster’s focus was jobs, jobs, jobs. But a careful look at the many jobs that would be created indicated that Hogan’s list was mostly a consolidation of existing provincial projects. The intentions have to be lauded, but with a million real jobs lost last year we will be watching carefully to see the nature and number of the promised jobs.
Moving around the townships I come across more and more young people who have almost given up on job prospects. Those who can afford it attend tertiary institutions but thousands of others who can’t mill around: they are young but their prospects are bleak.
And when we listened to Zuma’s ministers in action at the briefings two weeks ago, there was no reason to say to them “tomorrow will be better than yesterday”.
In fact some seem to believe they are part of a newly elected ANC government instead of one that should be tightening and finishing off the work of its predecessors in the past 15 years.
Richard Baloyi, the public service and administration minister, spoke of how the government was trying to create a new kind of employee, one who is dedicated to the work, not corrupt and committed to higher ethical standards.
Now that has been government mantra since 1994, so for Baloyi to announce in 2010 this “new initiative” was — to be kind — baffling.
Naledi Pandor, the minister of science and technology, was honest enough to admit that most of what her cluster was announcing was repetition; she implored journalists to wait for the July Cabinet lekgotla from which many exciting projects would flow.
I am still struggling to decide what to make of Sicelo Shiceka, the minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs. He announced that the “turnaround strategy” his department had adopted to deal with challenges in local government was “revolutionary”. And he talks a good game and puts a convincing case across. But when you go home and watch the evening news the same day and all you see is yet another township in flames because of service delivery protests, you start wondering who to take seriously — the revolutionary plan or the agitated community members burning tyres and marching.
Shiceka’s explanation is that the number of the protests is a testament to government delivery: because people realise that government responds positively to their demands, they protest more, he reasoned.
A collective appraisal of the ministers’ work does not inspire confidence. But, when Zuma spoke to the Mail & Guardian last week, he emphasised that he has spent time putting the machinery in place and reconfiguring government and therefore expects things to start rolling out.
“You will recall that when I made the State of the Nation address I said 2010 is the year of action. It’s because I’m confident now that the machinery is more or less in place. We can now begin to move,” he told us. It’s time we saw the action, Mr President.
And when you do act, it should not be for the political convenience of the ANC’s national general council’s review of your mid-term.