Manuel: will he stay?

Finance Minister Trevor Manuel says he is committed to public service, but that it might not be in the same job.

Manuel has become a totem or a symbol of economic and political stability.

The second question people ask after inquiring whether Jacob Zuma will win at the ANC’s conference at Polokwane next week is: ‘What will Trevor Manuel do?”

‘It’s a terrible burden,” he says of his symbolism.

‘Years ago I said to President Thabo 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 who has not worked gets deployed back to Parliament.

‘At the time of my appointment, 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 to me ‘thank god ministers have a limited shelf-life’. Everybody wanted to run me out of town,” he says, laughing wryly.

‘Change is inevitable. Some of the longest-serving ministers, like Paul Martin of Canada and Gordon Brown [formerly British chancellor of the exchequer], have not been very good in senior leadership positions. I think I’ve now overtaken Peter Castello of Australia as one of the longest-serving finance ministers in the world.”

The Mail & Guardian asked whether Manuel was still committed to public service and whether he would 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 account-able, but I don’t want to be beholden. Being beholden is an outcome of patronage.”

Manuel says he is concerned that an ethos of public service risks being lost in extended battles and factionalism ahead of the Polokwane conference.