Trevor Manuel, new minister of finance, in The Mark Gevisser Profile
ASK any Western Cape activist the secret of Trevor Manuel’s success and you’ll be told, ”Hy’t gejob innie area.” He’s a homeboy; he worked his own ‘hood.
In the worlds of Davos and Brussels, he might be the smoothest South African product to have emerged in the pipe-fragrant wake of Thabo Mbeki. In that inexplicable place that rules us all, The Market, he might be the reason why our rand buys more or less. But in the working-folk townships of Kensington and Factreton, he’s that hard-working young fellow who used to go door-to-door selling Grassroots; who built a civics movement around whether you could build hokkies in your yard and hang washing-lines between your tenements.
He’s the one who, in the rough-and-tumble world of Cape Flats politics, once even punched out current Western Cape Nat MEC Peter Marais at a public meeting; the long-haired biker who used to cruise around in tight Lee jeans, studded shoes and leather jacket. He’s the one who used to lead the klaberjas sessions in Victor Verster prison, where he spent a good three years in detention during the states of emergency.
What is truly astonishing about our new minister of finance is not that he is the country’s first black captain of the economy. Nor is it that he has only just celebrated his 40th birthday, or that he is not a professional businessman. It’s that, only a decade ago, he was a rough-hewn United Democratic Front street-activist. It’s that he has no tertiary education but for a technical diploma in civil engineering. It’s that this solid workhorse of the UDF — a man who made sure the folks were on board rather than one who soared into high-falutin’ policy — has emerged as one of the sharpest managers of the new government.
Manuel loves to sing and dance goema-style and remains a raver in that uniquely Western Cape way. But he has trimmed his trademark Castro- beard down to a discreet little moustache. He is to be seen, now, in power-suits rather than fishermen’s sweaters. He still loves his Flight of the Fish Eagle brandy, though, and he still loves a fight, as Anglo’s Michael Spicer discovered when he challenged Manuel’s competition policy. There remains something homey in his slate eyes, something rough in his features that not even a lifetime of transatlantic Concorde could smooth out. It’s a commodity that The Market, purportedly ”jittery” about his appointment, doesn’t unfortunately measure: it’s called realness, and Manuel’s got it in buckets.
Despite his worker roots, Manuel’s elevation to perhaps the most important Cabinet post after those of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki is not a bolt from the blue. Following a short spell in the private sector when he worked for the Mobil Foundation, the ANC made him head of its Department of Economic Planning in 1990. He, in fact, was responsible for fiscal policy while his colleague Tito Mboweni handled trade and industry. Mboweni was preparing for the Trade and Industry post that Manuel got, and Manuel was apparently expecting to be deputy minister of finance under Derek Keys.
Very much under the tutelage of Mbeki (an economist by training), Manuel played a critical role in guiding the ANC away from its traditional adherence to centralised planning and towards the market economy it was to espouse. At the side of the ANC’s consummate diplomat, Manuel was introduced into the world of international finance. Some in the ANC believe his rapid rise to be the result not only of his managerial competence, but of the fact that he has been one of the few people comfortable in both the ex-UDF nexus around Cyril Ramaphosa — his natural home — and the the exile nexus around Mbeki. Even in his early political days as a UDF activist in the treacherous Western Cape, he displayed a remarkable acuity for remaining out of faction fights.
His victory, in Trade and Industry, was to take a department whose sole raison d’tre was to stifle competition, and make it the vanguard of a ”liberalised” market economy. Convinced that South Africa’s introspective economy — a function of apartheid isolation — was fatal, he embraced the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) in a way that few other developing countries did, and set about slashing tariffs and threatening monopolies.
He made few friends, either in big business – –whom he baited with tough anti-monopoly talk — or among comrades in the labour movement: the lifting of industrial protections inevitably means job-loss. ”I’m talking to a trade unionist,” he says with trademark laconic Bogart-from-Bonteheuwel narrative style (as if the South African transition were a Chandler novel), ”and he is explaining to me what he calls the view of the left on issues like jobs, international trade, etcetera. So I say to him, ‘hold on’, and I go off to find an old Newsweek that has an article on Pat Buchanan in it. And I read it to him and say, ‘You’re saying what Buchanan’s saying, and you’re telling me it’s a left view?’ ”
He remains deeply unpopular among both unions and management in the motor and textile and clothing industries, which have borne the brunt of tariff liberalisation. Given his own roots (his mother is a textile worker), the symbolism was intense when his ex-UDF comrade Ebrahim Patel led a march of the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union to Parliament to present him with a withered bouquet of flowers. The implication: he had betrayed his own.
As we sit in the kitchen of Kader Asmal’s
ministerial residence in Pretoria (where Manuel ”squats” when in town), I ask him how he feels about his Department of Trade and Industry’s reputation as the swashbuckling New Thatcherites of our time.
Suddenly, before my eyes, the remains of our Nando’s meal becomes a micro-economy. With two empty Coke cans, a roll of paper towels, a cold chicken breast and a steadily emptying pack of Gauloises, the industrial drama of tariff reduction is played out on Asmal’s table, replete with misled workers, misguided unions and mollycoddled industrialists who claim to want market policies while not wanting to lose any of their privileges.
With passion now, he outlines his pragmatism: ”Africa is dying!”; African countries have either resisted the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund or prostrated themselves before it — either way they are ”feeble, that’s the real world we live in … Rather than seeing these institutions as God or the Devil Incarnate, my view is the agnostic one that says, ‘Shit! This thing is here! It’s alive … Let’s rather work out how to deal with it, let’s study the countries who have worked the system because they dared to understand it.”
Likewise, Gatt ”is not a decision taken by comrades around the world. So you say, ‘Don’t like it! Don’t like it!’ But it’s out there. It’s real. We gotta understand what it’s about, and work it.”
Many on the left of the ANC are deeply suspicious of this pragmatism, which they see as a Trojan Horse for the interests of global capital. ”Trevor,” says one senior player, ”has been overeager to show the West that we’re on board. So he has concentrated too heavily on trade policy and on external perceptions rather than industrial policy and internal requirements. There’s this naive liberal belief that free competition will solve all our ills.”
Remembering his beginnings in the civics movement, Manuel tells a story that seems, to me, to be a perfect guide to his philosophy of pragmatism. He recalls that, in Factreton, there was a group of tenants who wanted to buy their homes from the council. This was resisted, strenuously, by a Trotskyist segment of the civic ”who opposed the view that people should buy their houses because property was evil and workers shouldn’t have it”. Manuel, on the other hand, suggested that the civic take its lead from what the people themselves wanted, and conducted a survey which revealed that 60-80% wanted to buy their houses. ”Watching what happened to the other leaders, how they just shrivelled up and lost their support base, was an object lesson in how intellectuals become alienated from their constituencies.”
His close comrade Cheryl Carolus talks about the ”organic” relationship to policy- formulation that grassroots activists like she and Manuel had: ”Trevor, particularly, had a remarkable ability to listen, to figure out what he needed to achieve, and then to go for it without ideological baggage. He was thorough and conservative, always the voice of reason.”
Manuel has nothing but disdain for the doctrinaire left, perhaps because he went to the elite Harold Cressy High School, where he — the child of ordinary workers — was exposed to the Unity Movement cant of the children of teachers and professionals.
Now, as finance minister, he remains as committed to pragmatism as ever. The private sector will be happy to hear that he is open- minded about exchange control. But if The Market expects another arch-conservative in the Liebenberg mould, it is in for a bit of a surprise: our new minister of finance is a Keynesian. ”I don’t think,” he says, ”that fiscal discipline is an end in itself … It’s about what you spend it on. If your deficit is funding an infrastructure which is creating jobs and will have a kickstart effect, then go borrow for it. You’re borrowing to invest. But if it’s merely to pay salaries, buy toilet- rolls and fund holiday flats for retired generals, you obviously can’t use the deficit to finance that.”
Which doesn’t mean he’s going to chuck money mindlessly at social welfare. He tells the cautionary tale of Zimbabwe, where ”for the first 10 years, investment in health and education was phenomenal. But today Zimbabwe sits with a deficit of 16% [of the Gross National Product, as opposed to South Africa’s 5,9%]. They had to borrow from the IMF to get the most rudimentary stuff.” So Manuel’s first question, when faced with his colleagues all wanting finance, will be ”is it sustainable? There’s nothing worse than the tragedy of developing countries where you build hospitals but don’t plan to staff or equip them.”
His mantra, like that of his new deputy, Gill Marcus, is efficiency. He thus puts much faith in the new Revenue Service, and in Marcus’s pet project, the Expenditure Evaluation Unit, which will, he says, ”tag each rand as if it were a fish, and follow it through, to see what it buys”.
Manuel is clearly — and openly — having a stressful time coming to terms with the fact that he has, overnight, become a commodity whose mere existence determines the value of the rand: ”We’ve had Liebenberg and Keys, and before that a series of Nats who were all established businesspeople and perceived to be fairly pliable in this thing called The Market. Now you’ve got something different: he’s young, he’s black, he’s uppity, he’s given other people shit.”
It’s an image, you can tell, that he quite enjoys struggling against.
Catch Mark Gevisser in a sneak preview of his Mail & Guardian column on Radio Metro on Thursday nights, when he talks to Lawrence Dube on Bush Telegraph from 8.30 to 9.