NOT THE NEXT MANDELA
Deputy finance minister Sfiso Buthelezi’s plan to climb up from junk status and out of the recession is deceptively simple: he will channel Nelson Mandela to repair the rift between business and government.
Buthelezi apparently believes his eight years on Robben Island, between 1983 and 1991, have prepared him for this task — something he equates with the Codesa talks during the sunset of the apartheid era.
Speaking at the Gordon Institute of Business Science a few weeks ago, Buthelezi said this “trust deficit” between business and government was akin to that between the ANC and the National Party in 1993.
“History will judge us very harshly if we fail to bridge the gap with business,” he said.
It’s clear Buthelezi doesn’t underestimate his own abilities — even if the rest of SA is sceptical. If anything, Buthelezi was seen as fundamental to President Jacob Zuma completing the capture of national treasury, symbolised by the booting out of Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas and replacing them with Malusi Gigaba and Buthelezi.
But Buthelezi says that when business has questioned treasury, he has stood up to the business lobby — in the same way that Mandela stood up to FW De Klerk.
“Do you know what Mandela did? He said: ‘I would like to respond to FW de
Klerk.’ And he went for him, he went for the jugular. After that, they came out and they realised again that we need to create a democratic SA.”
It’s a tortured comparison which says much about Buthelezi’s ego. Yet, in his first months in office, he’s been all but invisible. At his first media briefing as deputy finance minister, he sat wide-eyed and bewildered.
Technically, he’s not ill-equipped for the role: his struggle credentials are solid and he has a master’s in economics — a qualification which many of his predecessors lacked.
But it’s not his qualifications that are in question. In recent days, the cloud over Buthelezi has darkened considerably, because he chaired the Passenger Rail Agency of SA (Prasa) for six years during its most devastating scandal yet.
This month, judge Ellem Francis found that Buthelezi’s Prasa board awarded a R2.6bn contract to a BEE company called Swifambo in a deal ridden with irregularities.
Swifambo traded its empowerment rating “for money”, and the judge said “the irregularities raised in this case have unearthed manifestation of corruption, collusion or fraud in this tender process”.
It came after treasury itself (in a probe started under Gordhan) recommended Prasa bosses be criminally charged for awarding dozens of dodgy contracts, worth more than R1bn, during Buthelezi’s tenure as chairman.
Buthelezi’s board, it is alleged, looked the other way when shady deals were clinched. And allegations surfaced that Buthelezi and his brother Nkanyiso benefited from Prasa contracts worth more than R150m. But Buthelezi argued that a “conflict of interest situation never arose”, as he didn’t use his position as chair of the Prasa board “to influence procurement decisions in favour of any company associated with him or his family”.
However, Popo Molefe, a former ANC national executive committee member and the current chairman of Prasa, pulls no punches when asked about his predecessor.
“[Zuma] has appointed some mind-boggling ministers. Buthelezi is one of them. There’s a big cloud behind him as chairman of Prasa,” he told the Financial Mail.
“When I met with Buthelezi and the corruption became clear to me, I asked him persistently whether he declared the conflict of interest and he lied pointedly to me that he had. How can that kind of person be the deputy finance minister?”
Though Buthelezi has described Molefe as a “friend”, Molefe says this is besides the point. “It’s got nothing to do with being friends or being part of the struggle for freedom together or serving at Robben Island together. It’s about departing from your morals after all of that,” he says.
Of course, it doesn’t surprise Molefe that Buthelezi, who was an adviser to Zuma when he was MEC for finance in Kwazulu Natal in 1994, was hired. “It’s Zuma’s choice, because those are the kind of people beholden to him forever, because there are so many skeletons in their closets,” says Molefe.
Buthelezi also has a worrying habit of going off-script. Last month, he criticised the Reserve Bank’s policy of inflation-targeting — by which it keeps inflation to between 3% and 6%. “When we are faced with the economic crisis that we’re having, is it appropriate?” he asked.
It played into the hands of his critics, who suggested he was supporting the assault on the Reserve Bank by the “state capture” brigade, led by public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane. It was a blow for his credibility.
Econometrix chief economist Azar Jammine says: “The implications of state capture have cast a shadow on his credentials. It’s a huge challenge to counter those implications and I don’t see him doing that.”
Though Buthelezi did say the Reserve Bank’s independence had to be protected, his bumbling statements knocked the rand.
“It’s very much in line with the attempts to capture the Bank. It’s also in contradiction with treasury and Gigaba. It places a big question mark over [him],” says Jammine.
Recently, Buthelezi’s press briefings have turned into laborious three-hour affairs, as he speaks off-the-cuff about Prasa, state capture or Thuli Madonsela — not exactly like charting SA’S democracy in the 1990s. So, Buthelezi still has some work to do to convince everyone he’s the next Mandela.