Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri ‘fails miserably’
The Democratic Alliance’s (DA) 2007 Cabinet Report Card was released recently. According to the DA it is intended to give a comprehensive picture of the performance of the executive arm of government over the past twelve months as assessed by the Official Opposition in Parliament.
Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri scored a dismal 2/10 in this report card with questions being raised about her ability to run the department. This score is significantly lower than last year’s 4/10.
The public gave Matsepe-Casaburri an average score of 3.3 out of 10, down from last year’s 3.7.
“Does Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri actually run her own Ministry, or has she let her Director-General take it over? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Minister has indeed allowed Director-General Lyndall Shope Mafole to call the shots,” a DA statement said.
“Where the Minister has become involved in decision-making, these decisions are invariably bad. Few Ministers have proven to be such willful obstacles to progress in their own portfolios. For this she is awarded 2.”
The DA says that Shope Mafole is responsible for the Nepad Protocol concerning broadband infrastructure and in terms of a recent announcement by the Minister, all submarine cables that land in South Africa are required to have a majority local ownership.
“This, of course, is a mathematical impossibility for cables that land at multiple African coasts. Yet, it is exactly what Minister Matsepe-Casaburri announced in Mauritius in September,” the DA said.
“With this decision, Matsepe-Casaburri is making it possible for her Director-General to refuse to allow any private sector cables to land at our coast, at a time when South Africa is desperate for international bandwidth. The subsequent change to specify majority African ownership may alleviate this situation somewhat.”
The DA points out that it is convenient ‘for the Minister’s previous Director-General, Andile Ngcaba, who acquired 3% of Telkom a year after leaving the department, the Second National Operator (Neotel) is still struggling to get off the starting block five years after Telkom’s monopoly expired.’
The official opposition further says that other aspects of the Minister’s performance are equally unimpressive.
“Many of the policies that she announced in her budget speech in May were only issued for implementation in September. The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) was obliged to wait for her Task Team’s report on Local Loop Unbundling for many months only to find when it eventually emerged that large sections had been plagiarised from European Union documentation.”
“Overall, Minister Matsepe-Casaburri has continued to be a brake on the liberalisation of telecommunication regulations and she has constantly proved to be an obstacle to the implementation of the Electronic Communications Act by Icasa. It should perhaps not come as a surprise, as the Act itself came into being on the initiative of Parliament, rather than the Minister,” the DA report concludes.
Loading ...