A year on and the promised performance agreements for ministers and deputy ministers has still not materialised, writes Qaanitah Hunter.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa was pressured by Luthuli House to not cut the number of ministers and deputy ministers, despite his public promise to do so, his trade-off was ensuring all ministers and their deputies sign performance agreements.
The president made grand promises of doing the unprecedented: of holding ministers to a standard and firing them if they didn’t meet that standard.
The news of a performance agreement overshadowed the fact that Ramaphosa did not deliver on his one clear election promise: to cut the size of the executive dramatically.
Ministers could never be objectively appraised because there was never an agreement on what was expected of them and what they ought to have delivered on.
It was worse for deputy ministers. They don’t sit in Cabinet and can only focus on the work delegated to them by the minister. In other words, highly paid ribbon cutters.
Ramaphosa’s announcement was seen as an effort to turn this on its head and enforce accountability.
Clear metrics
There was an expectation that, when a minister or a deputy minister in Ramaphosa’s executive would get fired or reshuffled, there would be clear metrics that dictated that.
I remember first asking the Presidency, after the anouncement was made, when this important agreement signing would happen.
At the time, they said Ramaphosa would first deliver his State of the Nation Address in July and that then, the performance agreements would be signed.
A few months later and there was still nothing.
At the time, Ramaphosa’s office said Finance Minister Tito Mboweni had to pass the medium-term strategic framework.
That happened, and still nothing.
In January, Minister in the Presidency Jackson Mthembu said on the sidelines of the Cabinet lekgotla that they were prioritising the matter as soon as the president delivered his February State of the Nation Address.
He justified the inaction at the time, saying ministers’ performance plans had to be linked to their departments’ plans and that was only to be finalised after the SONA.
Ramaphosa again promised publically during his address that he would hold the executive accountable through the signing of Performance Agreements.
Weeks went by, and nothing.
After media queries, the Presidency sent some sort of performance framework to ministers to complete, but no one took it seriously.
And then the pandemic hit.
Covid-19 blamed
This week, when Mthembu was asked why performance agreements had not been not signed, he blamed Covid-19.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected some of the initial plans and budgets of the various departments leading to the review of the APPs. The reprioritisation of budgets also had an impact on the Medium Term Strategic Framework (MTSF) targets for financial year 2020-2021, and departments’ Strategic Plans 2020-2025 and APPs 2020/2021,” he said.
Mthembu said the responsibilities of ministers was extracted from the revised APPs, submitted to Parliament last week.
“We are collating these ministerial responsibilities into draft Performance Agreements to be signed with the president. This process is almost at its tail end,” he said.
Ramaphosa would sign these agreements in the coming days, he added.
“Government remains committed to continue to enhance accountability through a structured performance management system at the executive level,” Mthembu insisted.
It is as if Mthembu forgot that he had made many excuses before.
Worse still, he is in charge of a whole department dedicated to nothing else but performance monitoring and evaluation.
Some government insiders laugh that signing performance agreements is a two-week exercise at most.
This may seem insignificant in the broader scheme of widespread looting and incompetence in government, but it is the perfect example of the lack of political will to hold ministers accountable, and ineffeciency in the public service preventing a simple job being done.
This inaction affects any ambition by Ramaphosa to hold his executive accountable.
Dismal performance
A year later, and it is it is quite evident that some ministers are performing dismally, but there is no metric on which to judge them, and that’s how they will get away with it.
If Ramaphosa fires any one of his Cabinet ministers it will be seen as purely for political reasons, like his predecessor Jacob Zuma did.
If ever there’s a time for ministers and deputies to have a clear plan of what is expected from them in the service of the public, this pandemic is it.
Not only must Ramaphosa sign these agreements with ministers and deputy ministers, he must also make it public.
In this way, ministers can’t get away with bungling up state-owned enties under their watch, failing to do their basic job or sleeping on the job.
In a few weeks, we will once again check in with the Presidency on whether these agreements are signed. There can’t be anymore excuses.
– Qaanitah Hunter is News24’s political editor
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