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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Ministerial Report Card 2004
The Democratic Alliance believes that the overall record of Cabinet Ministers since they assumed or re-assumed office in April this year has been passable but lacklustre. In a rating of ministerial performance on a scale of one (1) to ten (10) across all 28 ministries, including the offices of both the President and the Deputy President, the average grade was five (5).
The best performer was the Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, who scored 8/10, while the worst performer was the Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who barely managed to scrape her tally of 1/10.
Our appraisals of all the ministries reveal some worrying tendencies, in particular the state's growing recourse to unnecessary and intrusive regulations in the private or commercial sphere.
The President himself earned the overall average of five points. Although he achieved several successes on the international stage (notably his effort to secure permanent representation for Africa on the UN Security Council and his contribution to peace efforts in the Ivory Coast), President Mbeki failed to bring about a resolution to the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe by his self-imposed June 2004 deadline (or thereafter).
President Mbeki was continually outsmarted by President Mugabe this year. Despite the Mugabe regime's assurances that it would adopt the SADC guidelines on electoral reform, its heavy-handed actions - such as the ejection of a visiting COSATU delegation and the continued legal harassment of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai - contradicted these assurances entirely.
Under the President's leadership, economic growth has risen to respectable levels and unemployment has stagnated, but the economy remains constrained by over-regulation, and growth is still far slower than it should be.
The President's most serious domestic failure remains the HIV/Aids crisis. He declined to raise public awareness about HIV/Aids, and in October he launched a vitriolic and unsubstantiated attack on activists and experts who pointed to the link between high rates of sexual violence in South Africa and the spread of HIV, accusing them of racism.
The President's habit of singling out critics of the government and viciously attacking them intensified this year. Victims of his 'rhetorical necklacings' included Charlene Smith; Anglo-American CEO Tony Trahar; Barloworld chief economist Dr Pieter Haasbroek; and, most recently Archbishop Tutu. The effect of these verbal assaults was to silence dissent and forthright debate throughout South African society.
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