Finance Minister Tito Mboweni. Photo: Siyabulela Duda/GCIS
Rest in peace, comrade Tito Mboweni says a nation still processing the passing away of a man who variously served it as governor of the Reserve Bank, as Minister of Labour and as Finance Minister.
In the popular imagination, he is the man whose signature appeared on every South African banknote. The 2017 hit song ‘Tito Mboweni’ by rapper Cassper Nyovest equated riches with the late ANC politician, adding to his fame and adoration.
Most tributes and commentaries about the late Mboweni have been marked by gushing veneration.
“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”, said Marc Antony in a famous speech in the play “Julius Caesar” that was penned by Shakespeare.
In today’s circumstances, one might complete the sentence and say, “So let it be with Tito”.
Was Mboweni a good person? Did his deeds benefit the masses? What will the history books say about him many years into the future?
Mboweni was part of the first cohort of ANC leaders and members who dramatically came back home after many years in exile fighting against the apartheid regime.
This was a moment when, at long last, the white state had been forced to capitulate in the face of an increasingly powerful and relentless anti-apartheid struggle.
Everything was changing, all that had seemed solid and unmovable seemed to melt into the air. Joyous excitement gripped the masses. Hotstix Mabuse belted out his song “Welcome Home”, rolling out the red carpet to the exiles and the political prisoners who were at last reuniting with their people and their country.
Many people who had fought against the apartheid regime were full of idealism and dreams about a new, just and equal South Africa.
Decades of hardship and suffering were about to end. Intellectual types were busy drawing up elaborate plans that would help to transform the social structure radically.
The trade union movement had increasingly and explicitly adopted socialism as its vision for the new society. Some moderates wanted a social democratic order modelled on the perceived socioeconomic equality of the Scandinavian countries.
Most plans were radical elaborations of the Freedom Charter and other documents of the national liberation movement including those of the Black Consciousness Movement, Pan Africanist Congress, New Unity Movement, and numerous other left groups that had been operating underground inside and outside the country.
Alas, it was not to be. In January 1992, Mboweni accompanied Mandela on a trip to Davos, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the world’s government and business leaders.
They had come to tell the world about the social and economic plans that the ANC wanted to implement in the new South Africa.
Losing their nerve after talking to delegates from China and Vietnam, the story goes, they decided to remove references to the nationalization of the banks, mines, farms and factories that were contained in Mandela’s speech. This event crystallized a process whereby the ANC leadership capitulated to the neoliberal hegemony then gripping the world.
Mboweni was later sent for training by Goldman Sachs, a corporate behemoth in global investment banking, in preparation for an economic policy and a future that was very different from that envisaged in the Freedom Charter.
Those who knew him say he transformed from a left-leaning and heterodox to an orthodox economist. His expectation to be appointed Minister of Finance in the first ANC administration was frustrated by Trevor Manuel who took the position.
Mboweni became Minister of Labour and after showing what he could do to change the country’s archaic labour laws, he was made an understudy to Chris Stals, then the governor of the Reserve Bank. Mboweni assumed the position in 1999.
Thus, was born the Tito the world got to know. A conservative economist and Reserve Bank governor that lived and died by the neoliberal mantra of fiscal discipline, monetarism and austerity.
Famous for having a stubborn streak, he never deviated from this economic approach that is promoted and imposed on the world’s economies by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on behalf of the international capitalist class.
Despite Mboweni’s affable character and his willingness to listen and debate which made him a good negotiator and consensus builder, both as governor and later as Finance Minister, he consistently chose the side of the rich over the poor, of the ruling class over the working class.
The ruling class and its ideologues praise him for introducing inflation targeting because they benefit from the policy as the huge amounts of money that they hoard are vulnerable to inflation.
The masses suffer from the interest hikes ruthlessly imposed by the governor and the resultant strangulation of the economy and the high unemployment rate.
When he left his position in the Reserve Bank, Mboweni went to the private sector where he became a director of companies including chairperson of the board at AngloGold Ashanti and Discovery among others.
He also served as the international advisor of Goldman Sachs in Sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, he was a capitalist boss.
Was Mboweni an enemy of the working class? The tributes of trade union leaders who praise him for his role in instituting progressive labour laws such as the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the Labour Relations Act appear to suggest otherwise.
However, a closer look at the outcomes of these laws shows that the right to strike has been undermined through the numerous procedures that must be followed by workers. Indeed, the Marikana massacre happened because of frustration with the labour laws.
Mboweni spearheaded NEDLAC where government, bosses and labour discuss policy, but the outcome has arguably been the tying of union leaders to a politics of class collaboration whereby the interests of ordinary workers come second and those of the bosses come first.
The ANC in power supervised the creation of an anti-worker neoliberal hell characterized by intolerable levels of poverty, unemployment, inequality and social chaos. Is this Mboweni’s legacy?
** Dr. Trevor Ngwane is an activist scholar and Sociology senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.
** The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of IOL or Independent Media.