Cabinet gets low scores for performance

Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen has given President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet low scores for performance and accuses the president of failing to hold the ministers accountable for not delivering on performance agreements.

He said during a media briefing in parliament yesterday that since the ministers signed their performance agreements in October 2020, none of them were made to answer for their progress.

There was 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,” Steenhuisen said.

In fact, in most cases the targets in these performance agreements were just copied and pasted from the ministers’ 2019 annual performance plans, meaning they’re likely to become redundant before 2024.

“There was never any intention to use these agreements as a real tool to enforce accountability,” he said.

Steenhuisen, who dubbed Ramaphosa’s ministers a “Poverty Cabinet”, said the Cabinet was failing with only 241, a mere 32% of the 757 service delivery targets met since they signed performance agreements in late 2020.

Steenhuisen criticised Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan’s performance agreement because it made no mention at all of eradicating corruption at state-owned enterprises or irregular, wasteful and fruitless expenditure in the entities.

Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe failed to improve energy availability to ensure constant supply of electricity and increase reserve margin to counter load shedding; or to extend the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant life.