Africa-Press – South-Africa. Nearly two years after Cabinet ministers signed performance agreements, none has been made to answer for their progress.
There is also no sign of the “regular evaluations” which were meant to take place.
This is according to DA leader John Steenhuisen, who slammed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet for failing to meet the requirements of their performance agreements.
In his 2020 State of the Nation Address (SONA), Ramaphosa announced that each minister would be expected to sign a ministerial performance agreement.
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“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,” Steenhuisen said.
He said that, in most cases, the targets in these supposed four-year performance agreements were copied and pasted from the ministers’ 2019 annual performance plans. This meant that it would become redundant before 2024.
“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,” he said.
The performance agreements Ramaphosa signed with each minister requires them to give effect to the seven priority areas he outlined in his SONA in June 2019.
These are:
According to the DA, none of the Cabinet ministers fared well. Some of the worst-performing ministers are:
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According to Steenhuisen, of 28 ministers, across 27 departments, 757 measurable interventions or targets were identified.
“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 three ministers achieved 50% or more of their targets – the highest being 56%.
“Four more scored in the 40s, and the rest were spread across the 30s, 20s and teens. The lowest score was a paltry 8% of targets achieved,” Steenhuisen said.
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