Deputy Agriculture Minister Thoko Msane
Boldly Thoko where no woman …
When Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, Police Minister Sydney Mufamadi and Labour Minister Tito Mboweni were just beginning primary school. Thoko Msane, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and the youngest member of Mandela’s Cabinet, had just been conceived.
There are children climbing all over government these days. Youths in BMWs run the provinces. Greying old men who have grimly punched papers for decades look on in horror as youngsters are appointed over their heads. They might sneer “affirmative action” at their new bosses, but that’s not going to help pay the debts accumulated through a lifetime of dependency on the National Party. Transition has meant a collapse in the natural order of things (age is to wisdom what youth is to folly, etc).
The system has been prised open, for one small moment, before the beast of bureaucracy slams it shut again; before those who remain in Parliament become hardened political professionals and those who remain in the civil service — guaranteed employment for the rest of their lives — become as grim and as grey as their predecessors.
But now the grimy window is open, and the wintry sun shines into the Dirk Uys Building in Pretoria. The light performs miracles, negotiating itself through the arcane interior of the Agriculture Department before landing, squarely, on the desk of Thoko Msane. She laughs, and tells me a story.
In 1987, she accompanied a delegation of women to meet the African National Congress in Lusaka. During a particularly dull session, she found herself sitting next to the irrepressible Brigitte Mabandla (dealing with adolescence when Mandela was imprisoned), who scribbled her a note. Msane responded, and the note was intercepted by the Teacher (Thabo Mbeki or Steve Tshwete, she thinks), who reprimanded her.
“I apologised,” remembers Msane, “but also reminded the chair that the Freedom Charter gives youth the right to play. I meant it as a joke, but there was also some seriousness to what I was saying. Here I was, at a point at which we were debating and discussing the liberation of South Africa, and there was a natural instinct to be young, to play, to be without responsibility. It does cause a conflict.”
Member of Parliament Preggs Govender (just out of nappies when Mandela was …) remembers a very different Thoko Msane from the same time, at the abortive relaunch of Fedsaw (the Federation of South African Women): “Women had come from all over the country to Johannesburg and, when they got there, they were told that Fedsaw was not to be launched. They reacted with anger, confusion and bitterness. There were many old women, and they started crying, just weeping. And suddenly, above all of this, a young woman’s voice could be heard, announcing that we should all pray. It was Thoko, and she led everyone in prayer. The old women calmed down. It was completely the right thing to do.”
There are many, in Msane’s generation, who were shocked into early maturity, and who continue to show remarkable acuity for people so young. Thoko Msane has a rich and mischievous laugh, and her wedding on June 16 this year (she married Tami Didiza, who works in the communications department of the Housing Ministry ) was, by all accounts, a great party. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine her “at play”.
A product of the famous Ohlange School in Inanda — established by ANC founder John Dube — she and her classmates learnt about the movement through their school’s illustrious history. Msane had no tertiary education: she entered the world of political ideas through the church, when she moved to the Diakonia Centre as a receptionist. Quickly, she became a social ministries organiser; in 1989 she was appointed national youth organiser for the Young Women’s Christian Organisation.
She had been an office-bearer in several women’s organisations, but her appointment as deputy minister came as a surprise to the ANC caucus. There were certainly many women ahead of her in the queue. But, for so young a woman, she had a significantly wide range of contacts: she had been an exemplary member of the ANC underground in Natal, she was well-respected within the women’s sector, and she had earned the support of the Youth League — who nominated her to Parliament and probably secured her Cabinet appointment behind the scenes. Despite all these connections, there was no dirt on her. She had, for example, brilliantly avoided the Winnie brouhaha by staying away from the Women’s League.
If the caucus was surprised, the agriculture sector was shocked. By her own admission, she went into the portfolio knowing “only four things about agriculture” from her early childhood on her grandmother’s small farm in Swaziland: “You plant, you grow, you eat, and what you don’t eat you try to sell.”
Not only did she know nothing about the complex web of regulation and economy that governs agriculture, but she was going in to the very heart of boererigheid; an area in which her minister, the National Party’s Kraai van Nierkerk, was the acknowledged expert. As deputy minister, Msane was made responsible for sorting out the credit mess, and has claimed for herself the role of advocating for the “emerging small [read: black]
There were many who thought that Mandela had sent a young woman with great potential to her certain political death. Over a year later, she has earned a popularity within the sector, and has also assimilated a vast amount of information, even though agrospeak is still clearly a new language for her.
Boet Fourie, president of the South African Agricultural Union, says: “We were very sceptical about Thoko when she was first appointed. Because of her youth, because she knew nothing about agriculture. But from our first meeting with her, we were pleasantly surprised by her very quick grasp of the situation. She was thrown in at the deep end, and a year later, she is still swimming.”
The Western Cape’s National Party agriculture MEC, Lampie Fick, agrees that Msane is “competent, hard- working and intelligent,” but, while he praises her “for wanting to broaden access to agriculture”, he — like almost everybody spoken to, including ANC- supporting academics — slams the programme she has initiated as deputy minister. It is called Batat (Broadening Access to Agriculture Thrust), and there is something onomatopoeiacally appropriate about this name: a read of its preliminary findings reveals it to be as stodgy and as subterranean as the tuber it sounds like. Whether it will be as nourishing remains to be seen.
Msane explains Batat as “a strategy to force change in the department”, to “enable the department to understand its new role of supporting and encouraging new entrants to the sector.” Fick shoots back that it is “gobbledygook, theoretical nonsense that won’t ever fly”; a costly error that has already sent over a hundred black farmers all over the world at a cost of millions “with no clear direction”.
How does one measure Thoko Msane’s efficacy? By the fact that everyone respects her even if they don’t like her programme? By the fact that she has marched into enemy territory and, through sheer force of will put “the small emerging farmer” on the map? Or by the fact that the credit system has yet to be reformed, and the provinces have yet to be issued with competency?
One thing is certain: she has one of the hardest briefs in cabinet — not only because of the difficulty of the territory, but because the man who should have been minister, the man who actually developed the ANC’s agricultural policy, is that go-getting Land Affairs minister, Derek Hanekom (who was still playing marbles when Mandela …).
Hanekom has stolen the thunder with his high-profile Land Reform Programme, and is stomping all over Agriculture’s toes by insisting on dealing not only with the redistribution of land, but with how that land is to be used too. Agriculture officials sneer that Hanekom is throwing land at peasants and not giving them the wherewithal to cultivate it. The Hanekom gang sneers back that their business is alleviating rural poverty while, at best, the Agriculture Department is just interested in developing a black middle class.
Caught somewhere in the middle is Thoko Msane. She calls it a “creative tension. Of course, if there’s good agricultural land, our ministry will see its value and envy it to be used in a planned manner, while Land Affairs’ primary concern will be to give it back to its rightful owners. Somewhere we’ll find the right
Already, Hanekom and Msane have crossed ploughshares over his statement that drought-relief subsidies to farmers should be cancelled. The statement got Msane into hot water with her constituency, and (testimony to her toughness) she challenged Hanekom over it.
Thoko Msane is enigmatic. She does not have the cocky aggression — that arrogance of idealism — that so many others of her generation now in government possess. She is no bratpacker; no Mistress of the Universe. But she’s tough and articulate, and certainly not shy.
Why then the low profile? Govender is impressed by “the fact that she manages to be vibrant and dynamic while maintaining an unusual sense of humility, even while being quite comfortable with leadership. It’s a very different way of engaging with power.” It’s a powerful combination: she may go far.
Perhaps what makes Thoko Msane different is that she is driven by morality rather than ideology. How many of her colleagues (on the ANC side, that is) pray every night? How many see themselves, as she does, as “doing God’s work”? Careful, though: agribusiness and boerepolitiek are ravenous lions indeed. They are licking their lips, waiting for a Christian …