Zuma, who has made greater government accountability a key theme of his nine-month-old presidency, launched the free-phone number to much fanfare on Sept. 14.
Service delivery is a vexatious topic in South Africa, where the African National Congress-led government has been criticized as being too slow in improving the conditions of the poor over its 16 years in power.
As soon as it went into service, the hotline was inundated with calls from disgruntled citizens.
According to Johannesburg's The Star newspaper, the hotline had received 445,197 calls during its first month and a half of service, of which a staggering 386,514, or 87 percent were disconnected.
The paper quoted Minister in the Presidency Colins Chabane as saying in reply to a question in Parliament that the calls were disconnected for a number of reasons, including "long waiting periods due to call volumes," prank calls and dropped connections.
Of the 58,683 calls answered, some 21,594 resulted in a complaint being logged by government staff. The report did not say how many of the complaints had been successfully dealt with.
The German Press Agency dpa called the hotline twice on Monday morning and each time was told in a recorded message: "Due to the extremely high call volume we are unable to attend to your call.cPlease call again. Goodbye."
The official opposition Democratic Alliance party, which raised the question in Parliament, said it had logged several complaints, to little avail.
In one case, the hotline lost the complaint, the party said, calling the hotline "a set of smoke and mirrors ... set up to give the illusion that the ANC government cares."
Neither the presidency spokesman nor Zuma's spokesman were immediately available for comment.