The wisdom and wit of Mboweni is no more

Former finance minister and Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni has died following short illness
ILLUSTRIOUS CAREER: Former finance minister and Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni has died following short illness
Image: ESA ALEXANDER/SUNDAY TIMES

We are losing some of the best political leaders of our generation.

Their departure serves to remind us just what tragically bad leadership we had in the 2010s, and why we must never go back there.

A few weeks ago the country lost Pravin Gordhan, an exemplar of everything that was once good about the ANC.

Now Tito Mboweni, a member of that organisation’s younger generation of leaders when it was unbanned in 1990, has died.

His family announced his death, at the young age of 65, on Saturday evening.

I first met Mboweni in the 1990s. I was writing about labour issues for The Star newspaper.

He was labour minister then. He was one of the nicest, smartest, most optimistic, most arrogant, most open, funniest, political players I have known over the past 30 years of political writing.

He loved economics and the possibilities of politics. He loved wine and fancied himself an accomplished oenophile.

He enjoyed political banter, and he liked verbal jostling and throwing a barb almost as much as his comrade Gwede Mantashe.

He was a famously terrible cook, but he loved food and was not shy to show off his mediocre skills in the kitchen. Or enjoy a long, liquid lunch at a fine restaurant.

From a man who was arrogant and full of bluster in his twenties and thirties, he mellowed into a charming, humble, thoughtful and kind older gentleman.

From his home in Limpopo (the Duchy of Magoebaskloof, as he called it), he would call politicians, businessmen, journalists, relatives and friends to dispense wisdom and witticisms.

Mboweni’s remarkable life will be written up over the next few weeks. He became labour minister at just 35 in NelsonMandela’s first administration in 1994.

He did revolutionary things at that ministry: introduced and shepherded the Labour Relations Act into life despite massive opposition from business.

Today, many workers easily say to employers: “I will see you at the CCMA”.

That is an institution delivered by Mboweni’s ministry.

The collaborative business-labour-government structure, Nedlac, was born in those years.

It may seem ‘normal’ today, but those of us who grew up at a time when employers exploited workers mercilessly, when the law regarded black workers as mere tools, what Mboweni and his team did changed SA irrevocably for the better.

Workers became people. This was the freedom so many had fought and died for.

At just 40, Mboweni became the first black governor of the SA Reserve Bank.

Experts have lauded his performance there, but you have to have been around to see him in the role.

He was flamboyant. He was funny.

He loved being the governor, he loved the institution and he never failed to remind you of the high office he held.

He was driven by a hunger to succeed, to be one of the world’s great central bankers. He worked hard.

Mboweni was 50 when he left the SARB. He could have played a bigger role in SA after his tenure, but this was the era of Jacob Zuma — and Mboweni was very clear that he did not think the man was fit for the presidential office.

So, he had no role in the new administration. He told the story, privately, that when Anglo American Plc offered him a place on its board in 2010, the ANC under Zuma warned the corporate that it did not approve — and he lost the opportunity.

It was a sign, he said, of just how brutal his comrades had become in their attempts to punish those they regarded as “Thabo Mbeki’s people”.

In 2022, Mboweni told me that part of the economic success of SA in the 2000s was because of the insights gained in the 1990s by Mbeki during his deputy presidency, with Trevor Manuel in the finance portfolio, Alec Erwin at trade and industry, and Mboweni in the ANC economics unit.

In the Jacob Zuma era of the 2010s, Mboweni pointed out, Mbeki was relegated to fuming in his study in Killarney, Irwin was “wandering in Africa” advising governments, and Manuel and Mboweni were advising international banks.

They were hounded out and their expertise and insights lost. That, he said, is how you destroy a country.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. Mboweni’s tenure at the finance ministry under President Cyril Ramaphosa was uninspiring.

He was either tired or unable to bring about change. He did well to leave.

Like Gordhan, like many of the ANC technocrats of the 1990s, in the end Mboweni was a tragic figure: their silence as a flawed Zuma rose to power has collapsed the ANC they loved and nearly destroyed SA.

When I saw Mboweni in April 2023, he told me he was editing his memoirs.

I fervently hope his family will publish the ramblings of this curmudgeonly, intelligent, irascible, funny man.


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