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Presenting what her party would like to hear from Zuma's fourth address that marks the official start of the Parliamentary year, Mazibuko said she expected him to present his future vision and outline a concrete strategy of how to get there.

"This address is an opportunity for the president to reflect on what the government has achieved over the past year, and provide South Africans with a plan for 2012. It also enables Parliament to play a central role in debating this vision and contributing to the strategy for the year ahead," she said.

A mark of this year's SONA would be that for the first time ever a black woman would represent an official opposition party in its reply during the debates that would follow Zuma's address next week in Parliament.

Mazibuko took over as the DA Parliamentary leader from Athol Trollip last year.

She said people want to be inspired and excited about their future.

"They don't want to be presented with another bureaucratic check-list of targets and promises. They want the president to be bold and decisive, to put their (the people's) needs before the internal politics of the tripartite alliance," she said.

Mazibuko said Zuma must start by being honest about his government's shortcomings.

"The DA has kept track of the pledges he has made in previous State-of-the-Nation Addresses and whether or not they have been upheld. Unfortunately, the vast majority have not been," she said.

The DA said it had identified 10 key broken promises that had not been kept by the government headed by Zuma.

Firstly, Zuma declared 2011 as "the year of job creation", but the country suffered a net loss of employment meaning the year ended with an increase of 107,000 unemployed people.

"Economic growth remained sluggish at 3.2% per annum during 2011, while other developing countries such as Brazil and India continue to outperform SA," Mazibuko said.

The DA alleged that the training lay-off scheme, that had R6 billion set aside in 2009 (the year Zuma first took office), was part of a plan to provide alternatives to retrenchments, but had only benefitted 6,000 people out an estimated 900,000.

The DA also accused Zuma's government of giving into its alliance partner, Cosatu and allowing the Youth Wage Subsidy to remain moribund at the business and labour forum Nedlac.

Instead of the private sector being the main creator of jobs, as Zuma stated in 2011, it was the state that generated the most employment leading to the government wage bill now accounting for 45% of its total expenditure.

The DA said this was unsustainable and would hamper rapid economic growth.

Service delivery continued to be a problem as departments only achieved 59% of their planned output, despite spending 100% of their budgets, said Mazibuko.

About 15,2 million people still rely on social grants without any direct assistance to gain employment and break the cycle of dependency on the state.

Mazibuko said there had been no progress on efforts to appoint appropriately qualified people to run state hospitals.

The DA pointed out SA's flip-flopping policies and stances in the international relations sphere with particular regard to Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Libya.

A practical example of the crisis in education, cited by the DA, was that Zuma had pledged that every child would have a textbook on time.

"This has not been realised. As of January 18, 2012, there were no textbooks available to Grades 1-3 and Grade 10 learners in Limpopo. Mpumalanga failed to order any textbooks to address major shortages, and Section 21 schools (which purchase textbooks directly from publishers) in the Eastern Cape spent only R104 million out of a R607 million budget allocated by the provincial department. This points to a major crisis in our education system, which is unable to get textbooks to students in time," Mazibuko said.

Finally, on corruption, Mazibuko said there had been little or no progress in the fight against it and this was marked by SA's fall from 43rd to 64th in the Transparency International Index in 2011.

"The passing of the Protection of State Information Bill by the National Assembly was also a step in the wrong direction. If the Bill is passed into law as it currently stands, genuine whistle-blowers wishing to expose corruption would find themselves being criminally charged," Mazibuko said.