The shocking Performance Agreement scores of this Poverty Cabinet
24 March 2022
Note to Editors: Please find important performance interventions here and performance targets here. A soundbite from the Leader of the Democratic Alliance is attached here.
Next week, on Wednesday the 30th of March, Parliament will debate and then vote on a Motion of No Confidence in the entire Cabinet - a motion which the DA announced and tabled during the SONA debate on the 14th of February.
This is not an action we take lightly, as firing an entire cabinet is a hugely disruptive intervention. But such is the level of destruction wrought on our economy by the incompetence, indifference and corruption of these minsters that we have no choice. It is clear that, despite his regular assurances, President Ramaphosa has neither the will nor the clout to hold a single minister accountable for his or her performance.
If he won’t do it, then we will, because the lives of poor South Africans literally depend on it. We have dubbed this cabinet the Poverty Cabinet because, as a direct result of their disastrous policies and their incompetence, an epidemic of poverty, unemployment and inequality has been unleashed on our society. Their actions - or inactions, in many instances - have caused the despair and suffering of millions, and all the metrics that measure this suffering are moving in the wrong direction. South Africa is a global outlier in this regard, and so the problem must lie with us - or, more specifically, with our government.
While all South Africans instinctively know that the situation here is deteriorating, our decision to table a Motion of No Confidence in the Cabinet was not based on feelings or perception. There is a wealth of objective, quantifiable evidence to show that every single minister in this cabinet has failed to do their job and has contributed to the demise of our economy and the suffering of South Africans.
At the heart of this evidence is the set of performance agreements signed by each minister in October 2020. Under pressure for the ongoing lack of accountability in his government, President Ramaphosa announced almost three years ago, at the start of South Africa’s 6th Parliament, that he would rectify this by introducing performance agreements for every member of his cabinet. This would then help him monitor their progress against specific targets. At the time he spoke of regular evaluations, and of taking action against errant ministers:
“I will be signing performance agreements with each and every one of the ministers and deputy ministers which will be evaluated regularly against clearly stated targets and clearly stated performance outcomes. And where implementation is unsatisfactory, action will be taken.”
That was on 19 May, 2019. Nine months later, by the following year’s SONA in February 2020, there was still no sign of these performance agreements. But again he assured the country that it would happen, and this time he added a deadline: by the end of that month. But this deadline came and went, and it was only in October of 2020 that ministers finally signed their performance agreements, to much fanfare.
Seventeen months later, nothing further has happened. No minister has been made to answer for his or her progress, and there is no sign whatsoever of the “regular evaluations” that were meant to take place. We are now past halfway through the term of this administration, and it has become clear that these performance agreements were nothing but a box-ticking exercise to create the illusion of accountability.
In fact, in most cases the targets in these supposed 4-year performance agreements were just copied and pasted from the ministers’ 2019 Annual Performance Plans, meaning they’re likely to become redundant before 2024 anyway. There was never any intention to use these agreements as a real tool to enforce accountability. After the initial media coverage of the ministers and the president signing the agreements, they were simply left to gather dust.
Luckily these agreements are publicly available, and so we at the DA took it upon ourselves to evaluate each of the 28 cabinet ministers against their own targets. We deliberately excluded the qualitative targets in these agreements, such as “institutional oversight” and “political leadership”, partly because these seemed to be generic and non-specific, and also because evaluating performance against these targets could be seen as subjective.
We wanted to score the ministers accurately and objectively by removing any possible bias, which is why we focused solely on the quantitative targets. We were also generous when it came to targets that hadn’t been achieved yet, but for which a minister was still on track. For the sake of this scorecard, we considered these as targets met.
In total, for all 28 ministers across 27 departments, we identified 757 of these measurable interventions or targets. And of these 757 targets, only 241 have been achieved. That’s a score of just 32%.
While this included a range of scores that spanned almost 50 percentage points, only 3 ministers achieved 50% or more of their targets - the highest being 56%. Four more scored in the 40’s, and the rest were spread across the 30’s, 20’s and teens. The lowest score was a paltry 8% of targets achieved.
Some of the worst performing ministers are:
Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi (Human Settlements) and Minister Senzo Mchunu (Water & Sanitation): 8% of targets achieved
Minister Fikile Mbalula (Transport): 16% of targets achieved
Minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni (Communications & Digital Technologies): 19% of targets achieved
Minister Mondli Gungubele (Minister in the Presidency): 19% of targets achieved
Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane (Women, Youth & Persons with Disabilities): 21% of targets achieved
Minister Thulas Nxesi (Employment & Labour): 24% of targets achieved
Minister Gwede Mantashe (Mineral Resources & Energy): 24% of targets achieved
Minister Patricia de Lille (Public Works & Infrastructure): 24% of targets achieved
Minister Lindiwe Sisulu (Tourism): 24% of targets achieved
And even the highest score - the 56% of Police Minister Bheki Cele, of all people - poses more questions than answers. Some of his “targets” simply involved submitting a report. Or where an intervention such as “increased visible policing” could’ve had a quantifiable target - e.g. numbers of boots on the ground - the performance agreement made no mention of such numbers, rendering the target meaningless.
Equally baffling is the fact that Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan’s performance agreement makes no mention at all of eradicating corruption at our SOE’s or of the crucial metrics of irregular, wasteful and fruitless expenditure. These are the biggest challenges at our struggling SOE’s, and the minister’s very short performance agreement gives him a free ride on this critical part of the job.
Deputy President David Mabuza doesn’t even have a performance agreement that is publicly available, so it is unclear how his performance is meant to be judged. He seems to be shielded from all accountability.
These performance agreements paint a picture of a cabinet that has failed in every single aspect of its duty. Not one of these ministers would have passed a performance assessment in the private sector. Which then raises the question: What exactly does President Ramaphosa consider a satisfactory score?
In his recent reply to the SONA debate he expressed his complete satisfaction with his entire cabinet, saying, "I preside over a Cabinet of ministers that are committed to their responsibilities, ministers in whom I have the greatest of confidence as president, and more importantly, in whom the people of our country also have confidence and the highest expectations.”
In other words, President Ramaphosa has effectively said to the people of South Africa that he considers a cabinet that achieves, on average, less than a third of its own targets as good enough for them. We could not disagree more. We think South Africans deserve better than that, which is why we will do all we can to fire this Poverty Cabinet next week and give our country a fresh start.
To further strengthen oversight, the DA will also seek to use the mechanisms of Parliament – by submitting a proposal to the Rules Committee - to call for the establishment of a portfolio committee on Vote 1: The Presidency. This is the only budget vote without any parliamentary oversight and, given that the president has centralised so many functions in his office, such an oversight committee is now of critical importance.
Issued by John Steenhuisen, Leader of the Democratic Alliance, 24 March 2022
