Dina Pule scores an E
The Democratic Alliance has scored communications minister Dina Pule an E in its 2012 Cabinet Report Card, citing her involvement in the ICT Indaba scandal, and her hand in the year of missed opportunities at Telkom.
The DA justified the purpose of its report card with the following statement: “Members of the Cabinet are accountable collectively and individually to Parliament for the exercise of their powers and the performance of their functions”.
The DA notes that Pule is South Africa’s third communications minister in as many years.
“For the past year, she has been in charge of a department that has failed South Africa’s information and communications technology (ICT) community for almost two decades. The Minister has not achieved any turnaround in South Africa’s slide down the scale of ICT-empowered nations.”
Failures
The opposition party argued that minister Pule’s two biggest blunders this year were her management of government’s shareholding in the ailing Telkom and her involvement in the scandal around the ICT Indaba.
“As Cabinet’s blunt instrument, she has managed government’s shareholding in Telkom like an amateur and torpedoed a financially and strategically beneficial deal with the South Korean telecommunications giant, KT Corporation.”
“She also disrupted Telkom’s Annual General Meeting by demanding to change her votes for the Telkom board, previously submitted by proxy. As a result, competent members of the board were voted out and the parastatal was temporarily left without the requisite number of board members and no audit and risk committee in place,” the DA said.
The party also noted that Telkom has halved in value under the minister’s tenure and is heading for a financial crisis.
Legacy
“This year, Minister Pule will be remembered for expensive shoes and the involvement of her romantic partner in her Department’s outsourcing of the costly and ineffective ICT Indaba,” the DA said.
The Indaba is subject to investigations by the Public Protector, the Auditor General and Parliament’s ethics and members’ interests committee.
“The Minister seems unperturbed by the true state of affairs in the entities that report to her or the impact the inability and inertia of her Department has on tackling the complex and critical issues in her portfolio. Her department seems to spend most of its time in talkshops or workshops,” the DA said, scathingly.
According to the DA, the ICT Infrastructure programme is the worst performing of the Communications Department’s programmes as it spent only 26.2% of its budget in the previous financial year.
It adds that the department’s failure to finalise a business plan for the broadband rollout in time for the current budget meant that this rollout was largely absent from Treasury’s budgeted infrastructure projects for 2012/13.
“Her public pronouncements skim the surface of the issues and she seems to believe that all is well and on target despite the crisis at the SABC, the Telkom crisis, missed deadlines on broadband rollout and the fraught migration to digital broadcasting,” the DA said.
Parliamentary attendance
“Answers to parliamentary questions – when they do arrive – are superficial and frequently duck the core issue. In terms of attendance, she only briefly attended the presentation of the Department’s strategic report to the Portfolio Committee,” the opposition party said bluntly.
Administration and finance
While minister Pule has committed her department to having clean audits by 2014, the DA argued that this will be a tough target to meet as it has been dithering for two decades and has inadequate internal skills.
“She procrastinates about many important decisions, hampering the work of some of the entities that report to her,” the party said.
“The Department has been hauled before the Standing Committee on Appropriations for under-performing, increased use of consultants, wasteful and irregular expenditure, under-spending for most of the year, and then fiscal dumping before year end.”
Bottom Line
The DA stressed that South Africa’s ICT industry is champing at the bit to fulfil its potential to make this a great e-powered nation, “but it is being hobbled by unimaginative, inadequately skilled bureaucrats with a penchant for centralised control and no sense of urgency. She must loosen her grip on the reins and give the industry its head so we can all be winners”.
2013 challenges
Looking ahead, the DA challenges minister Pule with several tasks for 2013:
- To boost the calibre of telecommunications knowledge and skilled personnel in her department;
- To put urgency and rigour into the migration to digital broadcasting;
- To finalise and energise the development and implementation of a national broadband infrastructure;
- To stop micro-managing Telkom and set it free to become a productive partner in the delivery of fast and affordable communications country-wide; and
- To stop micro-managing the SABC and allow the board and executive management to root out nepotism and political interference so they can turn the corporation around.
How The Cabinet report card works
Members who receive grades D-E do so for the following reasons according to the DA:
- The Minister’s vision is weak;
- The Minister’s vision is not implemented effectively and achievements are limited;
- The Minister shows little regard for accountability and parliamentary oversight;
- The Minister’s management of his/her department is weak.
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