TITO ON HIS PERCH
Roaming Magoebaskloof with its biggest fan
Fifteen minutes into our breakfast at the airy Mountain Café, a young couple approach our table. “Minister Mboweni,” the husband and wife beam, “we just want to thank you for what you are doing for this country.” We have occupied a corner table on the outside porch, within eyeshot of endless rows of the tall timber trees that are the mainstay of the economy of Magoebaskloof in Limpopo. The restaurant is in a valley, on the upper end of a lake stocked with trout.
Tito Mboweni loves the mountain he has called home for over a decade, and it’s not hard to see why. The place is breathtaking. He gets animated when describing its beauty, economy and attractions. “It reminds me of the English countryside. We have a house in Derbyshire,” he fondly says of the home belonging to the English family that took him in when he went into exile in the UK in the mid-’80s.
When he decided to return to his roots after decades of struggle, he found Tzaneen too humid, so he settled for the cooler climate up the kloof with its subtropical evergreen forests. Mountain Café is on a farm 30km from Tzaneen where blueberries and kiwifruit are grown for export. The restaurant was converted from a shed by the owner, who left a fulltime job to settle on the mountain.
Mboweni gets the celebrity treatment. The owner and staff greet him enthusiastically, exchanging pleasantries with their famous customer. He’s in simple banana-coloured chinos, a navy checked jacket covering a T-shirt, a cap, and the brown leather veldskoene he gets mercilessly mocked for on Twitter.
“These are Clarks, people don’t understand,” he defends his footwear wPheRn I point them out.
He reminds me — as he’s done since agreeing to invite me to his bush hideout — that this won’t be a formal interview but a lengthy conversation with the finance minister over breakfast, later dinner, and, if I’m lucky, lunch the next day. Ground rules: I’m not allowed to ask about the growing rumour that he is on the verge of resigning. ANC politics are also off-limits. I have no plans to abide by those rules.
It’s overcast, but not misty. He urges me to see more of the mountain, visit the waterfall, try ziplining and other activities the area is famous for.
Despite the rules, he is the first to veer into politics. “People say the ANC hasn’t done anything, but the ANC built this highway. It wasn’t here before 1994,” he says, pointing to the R-71 mountain pass that connects Polokwane, Tzaneen and the Kruger National Park.
I seize the moment and push him on the current state of the ANC. As we met, President Cyril Ramaphosa was facing one of his toughest national executive committee meetings. It had been reported the previous day that Tony Yengeni asked him to step aside. Why had Mboweni not tuned in to the virtual NEC meeting to defend his comrade? “I asked to be excused,” he says. He gives me a mini history lesson about how he joined the party in 1980, saying that years of unbroken service qualify him to be a veteran.
A young Mboweni was politicised at Turfloop (now the University of the North) in the late ’70s, skipping the country in 1980 to join the ANC in Lesotho. He studied economics in the UK and worked for the ANC in Lusaka, Zambia, in the high command structures of the Political Military Council.
The ANC is in this state of dysfunction because it’s been infiltrated by those who are alien to its principle, he proffers. Genuine ANC cadres sacrifice for the party, they would never loot public coffers. The mistake the party made was to open up its membership to all after unbanning, which attracted characters who did not have the party or SA’s interests at heart.
“The people that are looting are not my comrades. When you open up to 1-million members, you do not even know who these people are. Better few, but better.” But he’s convinced the ANC can self-correct. I laugh out loud.
He reminds me that the state capture project actually failed.
“They failed because this country has strong institutions. They tried to steal at National Treasury, but the system we put there wouldn’t let them. They tried to ruin the institutions of this country, but those institutions remained strong. The judiciary and other institutions wouldn’t be captured.”
There is talk that Mboweni has informed Ramaphosa of his intention to leave. According to two people with intimate knowledge of the subject, he only agreed to serve for one year after the 2019 national elections and was now keen to leave. However, Ramaphosa cannot find a suitable replacement who will be accepted by the markets. Frontrunners to replace him, Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago and former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas, are said to have declined offers to succeed Mboweni.
“Who told you that? It’s not true.” He declines to discuss it further, and sways the conversation to another direction.
“People are relying too much on government for a job. They must go out there and set up their own private enterprises and employ others. The owner of this café didn’t wait for government, he went and looked for funding and started this business. He employs people.”
But the owner of this café was employed, probably had access to savings and was creditworthy. An unemployed youngster from Sebokeng with the same dream would struggle to create such a niche business, I interject.
He tells the story of Nomsa, a waitress who served him breakfast for 10 years at a restaurant in Sandton. How he eventually got her to understand the farm origins of the food she was serving to customers daily.
Nomsa is now a successful pig farmer and Mboweni is a proud mentor.
“We need to create more Nomsas. That’s how this economy will grow.”
We are about to discuss the state of the economy in depth when a group of young women out for an early lunch finally recognise the man they’ve been seated next to for the past half hour. They shriek with excitement. “It’s him, it’s him.” They demand a picture. Their subject obliges but insists on keeping his mask on. He only takes it off when they protest and puts it back on immediately after the mini-shoot.
We end the breakfast; he has another engagement, but we’ll meet again in the evening.
Shortly after we say our goodbyes, he posts the picture to his 870,000 Twitter followers.
Our dinner won’t be at his farm, sadly. I won’t get to see him cook pilchards or overroast a chicken. We meet at the Magoebaskloof Hotel, the anchor of tourism on the mountain. The hotel is close to his heart, and he fought tirelessly to save it from going under during the early stages of the Covid lockdown.
He was furious when the owner told him he didn’t qualify for tourism relief funding because the establishment is white-owned.
“I called Khensani [tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane] and said you can’t do this! These young ministers, they think that being black is a revolutionary act. It’s not, we are a nonracial organisation as the ANC and run a nonracial government. This hotel employs 30 South Africans.”
Through his efforts, the hotel managed to secure funding from another tourism fund and is now back in business. “I didn’t benefit financially from [helping to save it],” he says.
The waitresses beam with excitement when he walks through the doors of the restaurant. We order drinks — double shots of his favourite 12-year-old whiskey.
What about his behaviour on Twitter? I shoot. Twitter gives South Africans an unfiltered view of him and he wants the public to see and know the real Tito, not just the finance minister.
He is not even bothered by the relentless mocking of his culinary skills.
The bureaucrats at the National Treasury have been pleading to be allowed to manage the account on his behalf, but he steadfastly refuses. “I will never surrender my Twitter account to government bureaucrats.”
Only that week, the president had chastised Mboweni for publicly rebuking the Zambian government over the axing of that country’s central bank governor, Denny Kalyalya. Is the minister trying to get himself fired? No, he deleted the tweets after the president called him.
Though he might deny it repeatedly, it’s palpable that the finance minister is happier up this mountain than down in the finance ministry’s hallways and boardrooms in Pretoria and Cape Town. He promises he will serve for as long as Ramaphosa wants him as the man in charge of the national purse. But he admits that he didn’t want the job in the first place and only accepted as a favour to the president. “Of course, I don’t want this job. I didn’t. I just accepted it, but I didn’t want this job. I didn’t say I was unhappy, but I didn’t want this job.”
Mboweni criticises the media and what he sees as its parochial view of current affairs. The South African media chases after sensation and not substance, he derides. A case in point is the scant coverage of the Islamic State takeover at Cabo Delgado in Mozambique and its threat to SA’s energy security should the insurgents reach the Cahora Basa hydropower scheme that produces 2,000 MW, supplying SA and the rest of the region.
“I’ll respect the media when it has a more African and more global view of things.”
We ask for wine and again he extolls the virtues of his beloved mountain.
He is an active member of the community and assists wherever he can.
He dismisses as a baseless lie another rumour that he runs the country’s finances PR from the mountain.
The night ends. Lunch tomorrow in Tzaneen. Moments after we say our goodbyes, he shoots off another tweet: “There is a malicious rumour that I have resigned. It is untrue. I am firmly here as the Minister of Finance. We have work to do. So much to do: fix our economy! No time for pettiness.”
‘The people that are looting are not my comrades. When you open up to 1-million members, you do not even know who these people are’