Pravin Gordhan and the national interest

Tits own. HE latest round of tension – and dam- aging market jitters – over continuing efforts to undermine Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan is the last thing we need, four months away from our credit-ratings deadline. However, the ANC’s willingness – with local gov- ernment elections out of the way – to tolerate such high-risk power play comes as no surprise. In March, commentator RW Johnson wrote that Gordhan’s room for manoeuvre in reducing spend- ing and taking other steps to win investor confi- dence and, thus, gain economic growth, would de- pend on “disturbing or dislodging the patronage networks on which Zuma’s rule depends”. The ANC’s contemporary behaviour, he wrote, was “weirdly reminiscent of the National Party dramas of the 1970s and 1980s when enormous pressures for change would be met by the fact that the NP’s clock was set not by those pressures but by the purely internal consideration of the relative strengths of the and The same was true of the ANC today, he wrote, which “can proceed only at the pace set by its inter- nal clock, which depends on the balance between its factions, its patrons and their clients”. Reasonable people would have imagined the multibillion-rand fiasco of former finance minis- ter Nhlanhla Nene’s sacking and his replacement for a few costly days by a backbencher, would have alerted the party to the risks of allowing it again. It may seem some consolation that those sniping at Gordhan are only weakening themselves and advertising the fact, but it’s false comfort. Every grubby machination in this unedifying saga is damaging the country more. What is encouraging is that civil society is dem- onstrating the democratic instincts that proved so decisive when last we had an embattled govern- ment that held the country’s interests hostage to