Mboweni the first in years with influence
MBOWENI HAS THE ABILITY TO BE THE COUNTERWEIGHT TO THE IDEOLOGICAL CRUDITY INTO WHICH THE ANC HAS DESCENDED
Tito Mboweni s appointment as finance minister is a wonderful turnup for the books. While the departure of Nhlanhla Nene was untimely and much lamented in the business community, we now have the good fortune of a better finance minister. Not that Nene was no good, but in Mboweni we have one who will have greater intellectual and political influence. It will be good for the Treasury, for the cabinet, for business and for the country. It will affect the ANC in an important way.
In the few weeks that he has been political head of the Treasury, Mboweni has boldly aired his views in public (and in the Treasury) with refreshing candour.
For instance, no ANC cabinet minister has said in public that SAA should be sold if the state can’t run it properly. No ANC cabinet minister has said that jobs in Eskom should be cut, or that the public sector wage bill must be reduced by 5%. Within a week Mboweni said these things. With everyone, including President Cyril Ramaphosa, having had to proclaim the merits of “radical economic transformation” for so long, Mboweni is wonderfully refreshing.
It is many years since SA has had a properly influential finance minister. Mboweni’s two immediate predecessors might have sat in the secondmost powerful seat in the cabinet, but neither had substantial political influence. This was mostly because they served under a president who did not have their back or who worked actively against them; but it was also because of the specific limitations of the individuals themselves.
Nene did not have political seniority, wasn’t widely known in the ANC in the struggle years and was not a strong character. He also didn’t take easily to authority; even in his last term when he returned to government as one of the few who looked good after the state-capture era he was reticent, shy and offered stock replies to questions when what was sorely needed was leadership.
Though Pravin Gordhan and Jacob Zuma started off well enough in 2009, Zuma did not have the least regard for Gordhan’s advice on the economy. Gordhan’s attempts to win the ear of the president were mostly in vain and Zuma played along only when he had to. Then he fired him.
By the time Gordhan started his second term after Nene’s firing in December 2015, the two were embroiled in a war on opposite sides of the ANC factional divide. It is fair to say that by the end of the game of ANC politics Zuma had met his match in Gordhan, probably the central figure in his demise. But that was through tactics rather than political influence.
Zuma significantly undermined the Treasury. The Treasury was attacked both for its hold on the national purse strings and for its ideological stance. An integral part of the Zuma era was its ideology. The narrative of the need to destroy white monopoly capitalism to advance radical economic transformation was pumped out explicitly by the Zuma enterprise. Mostly this was outside of the ANC the Gupta media, the Mzwanele foundations creaming off money from state-owned enterprises, Bell Pottinger, the crony black business formations but it gained currency within the ANC.
While the party has always had a broad range of ideologies, within this environment there was no counterweight to the socalled radicalism, which was articulated with increasing boldness and crudity. There was no Trevor Manuel to debunk the myths of radical populism and warn about the danger of too much debt, and no Jabu Moleketi to warn of the dangers of a dual labour market for competitiveness.
Enoch Godongwana, the head of the ANC national executive’s economic transformation committee, was invisible except at ANC conference time, when he would emerge to help shove business-friendly policy positions through when the warring factions were distracted. At Nasrec he failed to do even this, and as a result we sit with a conference commitment to expropriation without compensation.
Mboweni an orthodox Keynesian alongside Manuel and present Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago left public life in 2009, occasionally expressing unusual political views on Twitter that could not be called market friendly.
So there is an element of him that is maverick. But he does have the ability to be the counterweight to the ideological crudity into which the ANC has descended.
It will be a good thing if he continues to speak with candour. Now more than ever is when we need a confident and articulate rejection of populism.
● Paton is writer at large