Mail & Guardian editor Ferial Haffajee interviews African National Congress (ANC) national executive committee member Trevor Manuel, who emphasises that the ANC’s ethos is at risk and must be defended.
“Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.” — John 2:13-16 (King James Bible)
Following Mo Shaik’s interview with the Mail & Guardian last week, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel wrote in an open letter that “it has taken 96 years of the most unimaginable toil and sacrifice to build the ANC into this formidable movement, it could be destroyed in five days at Polokwane — don’t do it!”
What did Manuel mean?
“There’s this great moment in the New Testament where Jesus loses his temper, occasioned by the fact that he arrives at the temple and it’s been taken over by money-changers, traders and all kinds of people doing wrong. He says: ‘My father’s house has become a den of thieves’.
“For many of us in the ANC, we treat the movement as our father’s house. It’s part of defining where we come from. We need to be careful that, in choosing people to lead, we aren’t so angry with those who are there at the moment, that we choose the anti … the anti is in many ways the converse of the [established] value system.”
In his letter to Shaik, Manuel wrote: “The ethos of the ANC over all its life has been Umfutho Kubantu, a movement of the people at its service.”
He says that “this notion of Batho Pele [people first] is very important; it defines the history of the organisation. The greatest moment in the life of the ANC was when it was recalled into that position during the mass mobilisation of the Fifties.
He adds: “It’s a notion of service,” but “the risk is that some people see the opportunity for leadership as serving themselves”.
The next 18 months
Asked about the key challenges of the next 18 months, Manuel emphasises not high-level political matters, but health and education.
“The first requirement is sobriety in the figurative sense. With the amount on the table [the country is running a sizeable budget surplus], we have to ensure returns measurable on the lives of people. We must be able to allocate and deal with it well.
“The cutting edge of democracy in the service sense must be in health and education. We’ve got to drive this agenda and be exceedingly hard on ourselves. Social security transfers are OK, but health and education are what count.”
He says that South African spending on these imperatives is commensurate with or greater than that of similar-sized economies.
“[But] the outputs are very poor. That’s an enormous challenge and it goes to the heart of what we want democracy to be measured by. We have not dealt with the necessary compact. Our relationship is reduced to that between employers and employees, but public-sector unions should be part of the developmental imperative. If we fail here, then we fail. We seek to measure the wrong things.
“The Constitution requires of us that we take steps that are necessary to deal with inequalities that focus on ownership and control. BEE [black economic empowerment] is a vital part of that, but if that’s the key measure, then we digress from the core objective of democracy which is a better life for all.”
“When Bolivian President Evo Morales was here, he was amazed at the provision of free basic services and the fact that water and electricity provision was not owned by American companies.”
Manuel points out that South Africa allocates a significant percentage of national income to the social wage, with the poorest 40% of schools earmarked for fee exemption and a virtually free primary healthcare system.
Then why is the government facing a class-action lawsuit by residents of Phiri in Soweto for better access to water? Would it not be possible to make schooling free?
The left seems to be looking for Venezuelan-style redistribution. Manuel opens his laptop to show a photograph of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in a red T-shirt scanning a crowd through binoculars.
“Not on your life,” he says to the suggestion that South Africa needs more of a Venezuelan touch. “We spend more than the Bolivarian Revolution.”
He adds: “One of the problems that confront us in a number of areas is the management of scarce resources. The water we have in Gauteng comes from the Lesotho Highlands scheme. It’s a finite resource.
“Wim Trengove [advocate for the Phiri residents] spoke about an inequality of use between living like this [he gestures at his treed garden where hadedas call and a swimming pool laps gently in the morning breeze] and people who battle to find water to wash. But if you’ve got four or five families living in the backyard, water will run out in the first week.”
In education, Manuel bemoans the fact that a sense of co-determination has been lost and that “you dumb down everything to an industrial-relations relationship”.
“I am amazed at the fact that three teachers’ unions did not convene in a crisis conference at the release of the results, which showed that our children can’t read or do basic maths and science … [I am surprised] that they did not see it as a major indictment on themselves. These are the differences I see from the Eighties. The forerunner of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union was involved in curriculum development and there was no salary for it; no enrichment.”
He takes a similar view on the health front.
“I went to visit somebody in a TB [tuberculosis] hospital in Cape Town. The place was filthy. The grass was knee-high throughout; black rubbish bags pulled apart; benches so grimy you could not sit down. There were buckets of dirty water standing around; the mops still in them as if somebody had just stopped working. The person I visited said: ‘We never get meat in our food.’
“I called the premier [Ebrahim Rasool] and health MEC [Pierre Uys] and asked: ‘Can it be that in the province you’ve taken a decision that says, “To hell with these people, don’t feed them?”‘ I found out that what has happened is that services have been outsourced.
“When Phyllis Ntantala wrote of her experiences at an Eastern Cape hospital [“Places of death, not life“, Mail & Guardian, October 22 2006], could it have been that those services were outsourced? Why is nobody watching? Where is a superintendent to say that we can inspect the food coming in so that it meets standards?
“My mother, who’s diabetic, goes to a public hospital and tells me: ‘I can’t eat the food,’ because nobody is checking that it’s for diabetics. Unless you fix that kind of problem to meet minimum standards, unless you require the same kind of diligence I require at the Treasury and at the South African Revenue Service, these things don’t happen.
“It’s a fundamental management problem. It’s not managerialism; it’s fundamental management. You’ve got to deal with that. If you don’t fight for the values of service, if you don’t fight to protect the trust the electorate has put in us in interests of democracy, you fail that democracy.
“I don’t think I’d be incorrect in saying that Umfutho Kubantu has always been part of the ANC, even on the debates on the margins. You take that away and the ANC loses it raison d’être.”
A sense of statism
Is the attraction of Jacob Zuma’s potential leadership of the ANC that he will return power to the grassroots, that what will matter more is the promised style of governance — one that is more bottom-up than top-down?
“There’s a curious sense of statism where the state is about someone else; that it doesn’t include public-sector workers. I went to Mitchells Plain and I met a group of old aunties and asked them what they do. ‘Ons is die health committee by die hospital,’ they said.
“There were problems. The nurses were not doing their job but sitting and watching The Bold and the Beautiful, that kind of thing.”
Did the nurses stop watching The Bold and the Beautiful? “Oh, yes,” says Manuel, adding: “I’d like to monitor that committee because that’s local accountability and it’s what makes democracy work.
“When Blade Nzimande [South African Communist Party secretary general] was chair of Parliament’s education committee, we passed legislation on school governance to hold schools locally accountable.
“The legislation is exceedingly progressive and it works in the leafy suburbs because parents can opt out and go to private schools; it’s influenced by the class position of parents and the confidence they have. It doesn’t work where the poor have no choice and the mechanism to construct local accountability fails.”
Manuel also speaks of the erosion of the service ethic by self-interest. “I have a good friend who runs a medium-sized business. The company runs maths classes for kids in Khayelitsha and Guguletu. They work through the syllabus, but there’s a huge curriculum change coming and they started talking to some of the principals about putting together a programme to help teachers master the new curriculum. The principals wanted to know: ‘What’s in it for us?’
“But that’s not what it’s about. What’s happened here? If that’s the position of the gatekeepers, how do you proceed from there?”
More money
The left often insists that fiscal policy remains too restrictive and that a bigger budget will solve the dilemmas of delivery. Not surprisingly, Manuel takes a different view.
“The quick and easy answer is to throw money at the problem. Run a deficit and it will make the problems disappear. But look at the latest expenditure by provinces. Look at the cash balances. With the best will in the world, people are not able to get the money to hit the ground. It’s not about surplus or deficit; it’s about how the money gets used.”
Manuel adds: “The next 18 months has to be about that stuff: can we ramp it up? Take a hard look at education — a tale of two schools. Do we understand why parents in Soweto send their children to Nirvana [a school] in Lenasia? It’s no longer because Nirvana offers maths and Morris Isaacson does not. How do we intervene to ensure better balances?”
Will he stay?
Manuel has become a symbol of economic and political stability. What does he plan to do after Polokwane? Is he willing to remain finance minister?
“It’s a terrible burden. Years ago, I said to President Mbeki: ‘You know you’ve got to reshuffle us. You shouldn’t ever allow personality and portfolio to become too intertwined.’ I’m not saying we should chop and change all the time, where you move someone to health and they fire everybody and bring in their buddies. You don’t want that.
“It’s the one area in which I disagree with the president. You’ve got to keep the benches [of Parliament] aspirational, where somebody who has worked can come through and where somebody has not worked gets deployed back to Parliament.
At the time of his appointment, he says, “these same people [who worry that he will leave] were willing to run me out of town”.
“In a debate on competition policy, Michael Spicer [then an Anglo-American executive, now the CEO of Business Leadership South Africa] said: ‘Thank God ministers have a limited shelf-life.’ Everybody wanted to run me out of town,” he laughs wryly.
“Change is inevitable. Some of the longest-serving ministers like Paul Martin and Gordon Brown have not been very good in senior leadership positions. I think I’ve now overtaken Peter Castello as one of the longest-serving finance ministers in the world.”
Is Manuel still committed to public service? Would he serve under a Zuma presidency?
“Yes, but that service does not mean I stay on as minister of finance. This is a hard and thankless task. But the longer you stay in positions like these, the harder it is for any successor to come in. I want to serve and be accountable but I don’t want to be beholden. Being beholden is an outcome of patronage.”
Manuel is anathema to sections of the left as a symbol of the so-called “1996 Class Project” — the South African Community Party’s shorthand for a secretive network of individuals that put in place “neoliberal” economic policies that stunted employment growth and deepened poverty.
“Blade [Nzimande] and Vavi [Zwelinzima Vavi, Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary] want to wiggle out of the fact that we sat in Madiba’s old house in Houghton and discussed this issue [of the growth, employment and redistribution strategy, or Gear].”
The challenge of leadership
This week Manuel wrote to the Times newspaper, detailing the processes of consultation on economic policy within the government and the tripartite alliance in 1996.
“The challenge of leadership is that if you’ve taken a decision, you’ve got to stay the course. Denialism will be our undoing. I must be able to explain the decision and if circumstances change, I must be able to change. I can’t pretend the International Monetary Fund forced it down my throat. There was no meeting with capital on this thing.
“At some point, I’d like to look back at what the alternatives were, because as Adam Habib said this week, even Karl Marx would not have had the option but to implement Gear.
“My purpose has always been to try to remain sovereign. We saw 10 years of remarkable change in Zimbabwe on borrowed money. Then came 1991 and the first structural adjustment loans fell due. It coincided with my appointment as head of the ANC’s department of economic policy. It became a challenge to take decisions to stay out of the clutches of other decision-makers; to not land at the door of the IMF.”
Reflecting on Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution”, Manuel laments that it is structured on a single commodity. “If the oil price drops, what would he be capable of delivering? We should beware the Latin-American version of populism. The challenge of leadership is not to make promises that can’t be fulfilled.”