M&G Ranking

In August, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams was reshuffled to the portfolio of small business development. However, her term at the communications department saw her fail to achieve the majority of items she had earmarked for her R3.7-billion budget allocation for the 2021-22 financial year. 

Covid-19 highlighted the stark digital divide, forcing many countries to advance their digital transformation, but South Africa’s minister crawled at a snail’s pace. Core to her portfolio was the migration from analogue to digital broadcasting, another failure, leaving it to her successor to have to reprioritise it again in the annual report. 

Ndabeni-Abrahams’s mismanagement of the South African Post Office over the years has led to it needing an R8-billion injection to survive. Commentators have called her “a hopeless minister” for this blunder. 

Ndabeni-Abrahams failed in getting the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa to release spectrum this year, with the statutory body scheduling to auction high-demand spectrum in March 2022. 

Perhaps her move to a different ministry will be a necessary clean slate for the minister who spent two years in her former portfolio and has nothing to show for it. Her core target for the small business development ministry is to promote entrepreneurship; so far, she’s only launched a study to determine which types of assistance entrepreneurs believe are necessary to recover from the pandemic.