Ferial Haffajee
Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel again displayed his linguistic dexterity this week. It has become a Trevor trademark to deliver bits of the annual budget in at least three languages. His fluent Xhosa brought the house down and the minister clearly loved playing to the gallery.
In his three years in office Manuel has also learned to speak the many languages of money, and early reaction to his budget this week showed he has become a past master.
The 43-year-old former civil engineer has earned his stripes from the generals of high finance for the respect he has developed among the markets which he once, famously, called ”amorphous”. This week they reacted favourably to his third budget.
Manuel has become adept at playing a game of give and take with business. He lowered company tax, but the government will recoup some of that through a skills-training levy.
He gave the demutualising Old Mutual the go- ahead to list overseas, and later this year will net about R1-billion for the Umsobomvu Fund which will filter money to job creation and skills development programmes.
He also spoke the language of ”the people”: his good-news budget lowered taxes, granted R3- billion more for job creation and improved the allocations for the criminal justice system. In election year, the minister proclaimed his budget stayed true to the principles of the Reconstruction and Development Programme.
In his delivery, he was every bit the cocky laaitie from Kensington who everybody knew as an activist in the Cape Action Housing Committee whizzing about on a motorbike.
Manuel has shown himself a savvy politician in a difficult ministry. He emerged this week as the fifth candidate on the African National Congress lists, despite the fact that his growth, employment and redistribution strategy is off- target and has, at times, earned the scorn of the ANC’s communist and trade union allies.
”He’s proven his excellence,” says Miriam Altmann of the Graduate School of Public and Development Management at Wits. ”He’s a quick study from the school of hard knocks, and he’s not surrounded by yes-men.”
Manuel is highly critical of provincial mismanagement and insists on knowing how departments spend their money. He keeps a tight hand on the purse strings and tightened it further this year, which hasn’t made him the most popular member of Cabinet.
A hands-on manager, Manuel is a perfectionist. A friend recalls how he would pore over civic organisation newsletters to ensure that there wasn’t a single spelling mistake. This week, he was burning the midnight oil again. His wife, Lynne Matthews, plied the team with tea as they worked until sunrise to finalise the budget.
Part of Manuel’s success has been the team he’s built in the past three years. It is a young team – at 50, Gill Marcus is the oldest member – and was drawn from diverse backgrounds.
Most were hand-picked as future Department of Finance technocrats and were taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, a hothouse of post-apartheid financial and trade policy.