Young Turks of the Treasury
wanted to be an actuary but her high school did not offer maths in the higher grade — until she convinced her principal to teach her and four others. Now she helps deputy finance minister David Masondo, who himself has a PhD in economics, about the finer points of bond markets.
A characteristic of the millennial generation that Moahloli shares — besides her comfort with questioning authority — is the desire to perform meaningful, impactful work.
“Our generation relates differently to work. Work is not an end, it’s a means. So in work becoming an end, my generation leaves for workplaces that are relevant to their course. Then they get blamed for job-hopping,” she says.
“I have been in Treasury for over 10 years and am barely 40 and I am referred to as young. I am not young. I might look young when I am sitting with an elder, minister Mboweni. He refers to us as a young team and I want to scream, ‘I’m not that young!’ He himself was a minister of labour in his early thirties.”
Modise agrees. “I never felt I was young. I only started to feel like that when I started dealing with departments. They sometimes treat me like I don’t know,” she says.
Making plans
Another team member keen to dispel the youth myth is Duncan Pieterse, 42, DDG of economic policy.
“Our team is young by the standards of government, but not by those of the private sector. Michael Jordaan was 36 when he became CEO of First National Bank,” he says. “I think one needs a combination of the old guard, like Momo [Ismail Momoniat, DDG of tax and financial sector policy] and Dondo [Mogajane], who have been there for a long time, as well as some of the younger guys, and our team is quite well balanced at the moment and it’s well positioned for the next few years.”
Pieterse, also permanently appointed last November, comes from Kuils River on the Cape Flats and graduated with a PhD in economics from the University of Cape Town, after a master’s in public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School.
Pieterse leads a team of 30 economists across three units whose work includes modelling and forecasting key aggregates such as GDP, inflation, interest rates and private investment, which the Treasury uses to inform the fiscal framework, as well as the impact of the economic recovery plans.
“You would have seen in the budget that we expected GDP to contract by 7.2% and the actual contraction was 7%, which is actually a pretty good forecast when other economists were predicting a contraction of more than 8%,” he says.
Pieterse’s team is responsible for conceptualising the country’s economic recovery plans and conducting mountains of research to inform them. “In 2019 already, when we released our own growth paper, we put our view forward of the kinds of things we think should be in there, and it is good to see a lot of those things having made it into the final [economic recovery] plan and also into the priorities of Operation Vulindlela.”
Most DDGs the Sunday Times interviewed said if there was one thing they could change to make their lives easier, it would be that the government would implement its muchtalked-about plans.
Masondo says Operation Vulindlela, run both by the Treasury and the presidency, is a reaction to that zeitgeist. The plan focuses on structural reforms — including the sale of spectrum, independent electricity production, tackling the country’s vast sanitation problem and focusing on the rail freight network — in a bid to get the economy to grow by 3.3%, according to projections by Pieterse’s department.
Pieterse says the budget balance was “personally” hard for him and the team, for whom maintaining the existing social safety net is vital.
“I think we were able to put together a very tough budget in a very tough context and I do think that many of the decisions we are making now are starting to lay the foundation for the kind of fiscus and economy we want to see. I think there were very hard trade-offs that were managed very carefully in that budget, and I am proud of what we put together.”
Mr Budget
The man behind the budget — praised by many and slammed by others for its apparent austerity — is the acting head of the budget office, Edgar Sishi, 44, who leads a team of 70 who are responsible for the country’s fiscal policy and expenditure planning. He has been at the Treasury since 2007 and has a master of science in economic policy from the School of African and Oriental Studies at the University of London.
Asked what keeps him awake at night, Sishi responds: low economic growth.
“The challenge for the budget office is that the more the economy does not grow, and the per capita economic situation deteriorates, it means the tax base remains static at best [and] tax revenue of government also remains under pressure. At the same time, the pressure on the spending side continues to increase and the calls on the fiscus continue to rise,” he says.
The demands of SOEs, public sector wages and social spending had to be weighed up, a process that took up to 20 hours a day, and more work on weekends. And last June, they had to compile a supplementary budget, something that had never been done before.
“If you think about the economic and fiscal situation we’re in, a once-in-100-years global pandemic, the challenges are very different from those faced by our predecessors. On the one hand you need experience but on the other you need people who have the ability and the temerity to take bold steps, unencumbered by the past.
“Previous officials didn’t have to take those kinds of steps on the public sector wage bill. We have done this and more. People say we’re young and naïve, but maybe that’s a good thing,” he says.
Sishi grew up between Umlazi and Ulundi, where his father worked as a clerk for the KwaZulu bantustan government. His hobby is cooking — unbeknown to Mboweni, who posts food photographs on Twitter where he receives opprobrium for putting too much garlic in his chicken.
“No, we do not discuss food,” chuckles Mboweni when asked if he knew of Sishi’s hobby.
Why they stay
“It won’t surprise you that Treasury officials have this exact conversation all the time,” says Pieterse only half jokingly when asked why he works for the government, eschewing a fat private sector salary.
“The reality is that there are no other places where you can do the breadth and the depth of the work that we do at the Treasury. What keeps a lot of Treasury people motivated and interested is the amazing breadth of work — wage bills, SOCs [state-owned companies], macro forecasts, structural reforms, social protection, employment tax incentives — we get involved in all of those things.”
Acting accountant-general Karen Maree, 45, agrees. She leads a team of 180 people across 11 divisions whose responsibilities include implementing accounting systems across all tiers of government, training staff, conducting forensic investigations of fraud and corruption, and training law enforcement officers on public and municipal finance legislation.
Asked why she works in the government, the East London-born chartered accountant and chartered financial analyst says: “Certainly it’s not for the money. I really enjoy my work, and I just couldn’t leave the people we have. They’ve really got big hearts. It’s a really fastpaced environment. The way we meet with national and provincial spheres to mayors of municipalities, the scope of work and the influence you have, it’s priceless.”
But for Estelle Setan, acting head of the chief procurement office, it is more than just the intellectual challenge — it’s a war on corruption.
The 52-year-old from Brakpan, who joined the Treasury in 2003 and the chief procurement office when it was established in 2013, is at the coalface of this fight, armed with 78 officials. Her job involves seeing to it that government departments stick to the rules when buying goods and services, and that the government gets bang for its buck.
“What keeps me up at night is this systemic corruption that has embedded itself in public procurement. We are having to investigate or do bid reviews and it keeps us away from the strategic issues that we need to address, especially now over the past year where we have seen the debacle over the PPE procurement,” she says.
“We are writing our procurement rules thinking about where they can be abused, which is not the right approach to take. You have to write the procurement rules to make it easy to do business with government, but instead we write them with the crooked in mind and not the efficiency.”
They are energetic, versatile and smart
Tito Mboweni Minister of finance
Lamenting the old guard’s departure
Vuyelwa Vumendlini, 44, DDG of international and regional economic policy, or the Treasury’s “chief diplomat”, can hardly be classified among the Treasury’s new guard, having been there for 18 years. Were SA ever to require an International Monetary Fund bailout, she and Moahloli would do the negotiations.
Brought up in Welkom, Free State, she holds a master’s in economics from the US’s Georgia State University, and, like Pieterse, has spent time at Harvard. For Vumendlini, who leads a division of 33 people, concentrating on those who have left the institution, as Ramaphosa alluded to — who include former DDGs Michael Sachs and Andrew Donaldson – is irksome.
“It’s not about what worked back in the day, it is about what is happening now. One often asks if things were different, what sort of team should be managing Treasury, and my view is that it is this team.”
Pieterse agrees. “The same people who spoke about our capacity challenges were the first ones to congratulate us on the budget. And I called some of them up and said, ‘Well, how do you guys think we delivered this when you keep complaining about the people that have left? Clearly there is depth here that you maybe didn’t appreciate’.”
Moahloli becomes irritated by talk of a lack of depth at the Treasury following the departures of stalwarts in the department, saying the subject has become racialised because nobody speaks of the departed black members.
One who remains is Momoniat, 63, who agrees that the departures discussion is a racial one. He joined the Treasury in 1993 as a member of the transition team that put together the first democratic budget. “We all came in as young and angry and wanting to change the world, and in a way I see that in our younger team,” he says.
“I had this discussion with a former colleague. If you took even the team from before, operating in the current environment, I’m not sure we would have been more successful.
The environment is much tougher today politically.
“Until 2008/09, the finance minister always had the strong backing of the president and cabinet. In the Zuma years it became a much tougher environment, especially when the president actually worked against his own Treasury.”
While a solid Treasury team exists for now, Momoniat sounds an alarm.
“My bigger fear is: are we growing that talent for the future? Government has become too rules-driven and risk-averse, and not principles-driven, and a less nice place to work. I’m not sure if such talented people will want to stay in government if we drown them with such silly rules,” he says.
Stadi Mngomezulu, 54, DDG for corporate services, which includes human resources, says the Treasury has been sure to “grow its own timber” and the institution has a “clear pipeline” of talent poised to fill the shoes of those who leave.
Modise left once and went to Business Unity SA where she lasted two weeks before beating a hasty return to the state “where I feel like I have a purpose”.
“Don’t get me wrong, soon enough I will go look for money, but for now I think what keeps me very happy is the value I am adding,” she says.
Adds Moahloli: “I am not one to stay at a workplace for 20 years, but for now I am here and working my butt off.”
Mboweni says he’s confident that future Treasury directors-general will come from the DDG ranks, and the chief directors below them.
“Oh yes, they will. I am sure they will compete for it when that time comes, without a doubt. I suspect the future governor of the reserve bank will also come from that team.”
We change lives every day, that’s what keeps me in the job
Mampho Modise
Head of public finance division