On a sunny winter’s day in Cape Town, Trevor Manuel sits in a deli along the Atlantic seaboard, a cortado in front of him. To the local business community, the former finance minister remains a figure of reverence, a reminder of the macroeconomic stability and fiscal discipline that defined his 13 years in office. But Manuel has little time for nostalgia.
“The one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t be too precious,” Manuel says, sipping his cortado as he recalls the sheer workload of his early ministerial years. He built the Department of Trade and Industry from scratch under Nelson Mandela, navigated the steep tariff adjustments of the 1994 Marrakech Agreement and then took charge of the national purse strings.
He sees public office as a duty, not a reward. “I had the view then, I still have it now, that when you are appointed into office in this country, you are very well looked after … but the idea is not to make you wealthy.”
When asked about the nostalgia that follows him, Manuel smiles and recalls a lesson from Thabo Mbeki. When Mbeki took over from Mandela as ANC president in 1997, people wondered how he would fill such big shoes. “He said: ‘I don’t even like his shoes, he wore ugly shoes.’ I’m saying: ‘It’s not yours.’ You don’t own it. Push yourself, carry on.”
Carrying on, however, has become increasingly difficult for South Africa, which Manuel diagnoses as suffering from a profound case of “inertia.” He says the country’s economic stagnation is the direct result of critical wounds it inflicted on itself after the ANC’s pivotal 2007 Polokwane conference, where Jacob Zuma defeated Mbeki for the party presidency.
Manuel points to “before Polokwane” as a period of lost industrial opportunity. He recalls an agreement with Airbus to build a series of massive aircraft for defence airlift. “We had the opportunity to contribute a significant part of that plan, and we were keen on it because of the industrialisation that follows. Polokwane terminated that.”
Other projects also came to a halt: the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, the hydrogen economy and the Joule, an early South African electric vehicle developed at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. “All of those projects stalled because after Polokwane came …” He lets the sentence hang.
He accepts that he can no longer shape these outcomes. “But I’m not there, so I can’t solve that problem. I can observe it.” Still, his analytical mind keeps looking for answers, especially on the erosion of oversight and capability in South Africa’s legislative arms.
Shortly before leaving government in 2014, Manuel approached Zuma with a proposal to design a technical training syllabus for members of parliament. Many MPs, he realised, lacked the basic capacity to read department gazettes, analyse actual expenditure trends or monitor public cash flows. The offer was declined, with officials preferring to hand his practical experience to highly paid corporate consultants.
“Consultants want to charge loads of money, don’t understand the value, don’t have the lived experience,” Manuel says. The syllabus still sits with him, and his diagnosis of the democratic deficit remains sharp.
He criticises the proportional representation system for stripping politics of direct constituency accountability, and local government for allowing councillors to bypass supply chain rules for personal gain. “I think our democracy needs a lot of repair work,” he says. “What passes for debates in parliament is actually a complete sham. Consider the police committee; parliament needs to look at the fact that our police service has been completely decimated … but members of parliament have no idea. Some of them can’t switch on a computer. So, they go to the department and ask people … and that’s basically what happens.”
In a country obsessed with political lineage and connections, Manuel laughs off a persistent rumour that former SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter is his cousin. “The EFF said he’s my cousin, and they lost in court,” he says. “We are distinctly not cousins. I also studied at Pentech (now Cape Peninsula University of Technology) and went to Harold Cressy as he did, but we’re not cousins.”
As he prepares to leave, he offers a final thought on his life’s work: “Knowledge is valuable when shared.”
Manuel handed over the Old Mutual chairmanship on 5 June and is now turning his full attention to the continent. He is spearheading the work for an African Borrowers Club and conceptualising an Atlas of Economic Complexity, initiatives aimed at reforming global debt and rebuilding regional industrial trade.
