The man who came through the gate that Monday in March was a very different person from the abrasive voice that had been on the phone the previous day.
On the Sunday, an angry Pravin Gordhan had phoned in response to a not-so complimentary article by this lowly newspaperman about his leadership of the public enterprises portfolio and his culpability in the continued malaise in state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
That the criticism had stung was evident in the haranguing, which was punctuated with “How dare you?” refrains.
The shouting match was abruptly stopped from this end, with the minister being tersely admonished for his tone.
The next morning’s communication was a far cry from the fire of the previous day. Much calmer, he requested a meeting.
When he came through the gate in a modest sedan and with just a driver and a protector (unlike most of the blue-light loving ministers who populated successive ANC Cabinets). There was no anger; just upset.
He had no time for small talk as we sat in the garden, him sipping on water and the lowly newspaperman indulging in cranberry juice.
He went straight to the point, having prepared his briefing note about how he was turning the SOE sector around. Over the next two hours he patiently gave a detailed briefing on the challenges and successes, entity by entity.
BRAVE SENTINEL
This would be followed up by a lengthy article in City Press a few weeks later in which he outlined the work he and his team had done to fix parastatals that had been wrecked by state capture.
It was to all intents and purposes a time to cement his legacy before he closed the chapter on his career in public office. The elections were around the corner and he had decided to call time.
Legacy was something that weighed heavily on Gordhan’s mind in his final years in office. It was a rough time in the life of someone who had mostly been on the right side of history and public opinion.
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He was a struggle stalwart, one of the key midwives of our constitutional order, the man who built the SA Revenue Service (Sars) into a mean tax collection machine and the sentinel who bravely stood guard at Treasury’s gates to prevent Jacob Zuma and his band of thieves from getting in.
For all those roles, carried out at great personal sacrifice, he had been lauded and venerated. In the last few years, the narrative had begun to change.
As his stewardship of the floundering SOEs was increasingly questioned, the halo started to fade.
He was now being characterised as an arrogant, unlistening control freak whose continued presence in his portfolio was stymying the repair of institutions that were pivotal to the country’s economic revitalisation.
This was a jolt to a man who had dedicated all his adult his life to the service of the people of the republic.
ANTI-APARTHEID ACTIVISM
From the time he joined the struggle as a youth and become a leader in the National Indian Congress (NIC) in the early 1970s, Gordhan never turned his back on activism.
He and fellow members of the NIC and the Transvaal Indian Congress (TIC) were critical to convincing South Africa’s Indian community to identify as black and struggle against oppression alongside their African and coloured brethren and the progressive segment of white society.
Undoubtedly, the marquee moment of his anti-apartheid activism came in 1983 and 1984 when he was one of the prime organisers of the Tricameral Parliament boycott campaign.
The Tricameral Parliament was the apartheid government’s sick ploy to divide black South Africans by creating puppet legislatures for coloureds and Indians and give these two groups the illusion of access to power.
There were already Bantustans for Africans, where sell-out leaders pretended to be presidents and chief ministers.
The United Democratic Front (UDF), a constellation of resistance forces across society formed in August 1983, led the boycott campaign. Gordhan was front, left and centre in that campaign.
Turnout for the election of the puppet coloured House of Representatives and Indian House of Delegates was a paltry 16.2%, showing the effectiveness of the boycott campaign.
From the word go, PW Botha’s sham deal was dead in the water.
The impact of that 1983/1984 period, however, was much more profound. It turned community activists in coloured and Indian townships, who had been fighting housing, washing line and school level issues, into political agitators.
Coupled with uprisings in African townships over council rent hikes, rising transport costs and other grievances, the moment was to spark a sustained revolt that would last until FW de Klerk, Botha’s successor would cave in on 2 February 1990 and trigger the transition from apartheid to democracy.
OPERATION VULA
That period thrust to the fore a generation of leaders, mostly in their thirties, who would carry the torch during those fiery times, through the bloody early 1990s negotiations and play a major role in the establishment of a democratic South Africa. Gordhan was one of them.
He paid dearly for his activism, spending lengthy spells in prison under the apartheid government’s detention without trial laws.
As was the norm, there was plenty of torture at the hands of the notorious Security Branch during those spells. Gordhan eventually had to disappear, literally, for four years.
From 1986 to 1990, he was a ghost, coordinating ANC underground military structures and operations.
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It was during this time that he became one of the critical players in Operation Vula, the intricate network of Umkhonto weSizwe units inside the country that was readying for a final onslaught against the government.
Vula was bust in July 1990, at a sensitive time in the negotiations when the ANC and National Party were still wading through trust issues.
Gordhan and other senior leaders found themselves behind bars. Some were temporarily driven back into exile while some were murdered.
Those charged with terrorism and other offences were given indemnity in 1991 as a way of moving the negotiations forward.
With the ANC having suspended its armed struggle, Gordhan was thrust to the fore of the ANC’s negotiating team, alongside the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa.
He co-chaired the Transitional Executive, effectively the joint multi-party government that saw South Africa through the early 1990s.
He continued his frontline role during the negotiations for the final Constitution, between 1994 and 1996, as chairperson of the constitutional committee.
Much has been said this week about Gordhan’s role in revolutionising Sars, his first stint as finance minister in Zuma’s first term between 2009 and 2014, and his return to the portfolio in 2015 after the turmoil that followed Zuma’s firing of Nhlanhla Nene and replacing the respected minister with a mkhovu (zombie).
A lot has been said about the valiant battle he and his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, waged against the hyenas that were circling Treasury, the continuing fight against state capture from the streets after the two of them had been summarily sacked by Zuma and his Gupta masters.
And plenty has been written and spoken about how he was hounded and harassed by state and non-state security and political actors.
For that and his contribution to South Africa’s liberation there should surely soon be a national order in the offing.
CONTROVERSIAL PHASE
The controversial phase, on which the jury is still out, was his handling of the public enterprises portfolio.
Entrusted by Ramaphosa to perform major overhauls on the economic engines that had been rendered nearly inoperable by Zuma and his jolly gang of wreckers, Gordhan took to his new assignment with the gusto and commitment that was his signature.
No doubt he was the right man for the job, but perhaps the time was not right.
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In the preceding years, he had been elevated to the status of national saviour and a task so huge and labyrinthine perhaps needed someone with less of the Messiah complex he had developed.
He alone had all the answers and would be the thought leader on how the SOEs could be restored to working order.
And only he had the answers as to who was best to fulfil the unenviable task of fixing the various entities and driving them out of the repair yard.
And so on.
Gordhan’s tenure at public enterprises was characterised by clashes with boards, CEOs and excos over what they deemed as ministerial overreach.
He tiffed with his colleagues over strategy. He became antsy and defensive. Brooking little criticism, he became the authoritarian that the lifelong democrat in him had despised.
He found himself in unfamiliar territory as a media that had once treated him with relative deference was now asking tough questions and throwing barbs in his direction.
INFANTILE EFF
The man who came through the gate on that Monday in March was that diminished figure, unsure how to respond to a world in which his legacy was being questioned when he had little time left to set things right.
It is a pity that he had to bow out on that note but even those serious lapses in his sunset years do not take away from the years of selfless service to the republic and its people. That is what the ahistorical crowd that are dancing on his grave do not grasp.
The infantile EFF, the very party that celebrated the butcher of Ulundi as “a man of peace” when he died last year, was first in line with its ahistorical take.
Conveniently forgetting that their new allies in the so-called Progressive Forum aided the Guptas’ collapse of parastatals, the EFF bizarrely claimed:
Gordhan was a man whose legacy is deeply intertwined with the destruction of our state-owned enterprises and the betrayal of the people of South Africa … Now he dies with his crimes unpunished.
“Every collapsed enterprise and every failure that left hundreds of thousands unemployed is part of Pravin Gordhan’s shameful legacy.”
The EFF has also been among those revisionists who sought to highlight Gordhan’s Indianness, and thus enable them to segue into pronouncing him a racist.
They have been joined by the corrupt who swallowed the Bell Pottinger Kool-Aid that sought to delegitimise his crusade against graft and state capture.
Another trope has been the resuscitation of his alleged links to an Indian-dominated cabal that is claimed to have controlled the UDF in the 1980s.
His detractors would have us believe that he brought his cabal tendencies into the post-Nasrec Cabinet and ran rings around Ramaphosa and other ministers.
He was also corrupt, it said, helping his family to feed at the trough. No demonisation is ever complete without bringing in Stellenbosch, the stated capital of white monopoly capital.
Apparently Gordhan served Stellenbosch’s agenda and his standing in the way of corruption was a means to keep the wealth of the nation in the hands of Johann Rupert and co.
None of these vulgar characterisations fits the person of Pravin Gordhan, who was an ardent non-racialist, a servant of the South African masses and a man who risked all to fight the devil called corruption.