In 2020, Jonathan Ancer and I have been commissioned to co-author a biography of Pravin Gordhan. We have been each intrigued by the person – in all probability recognized greatest on the time for his resistance to former President Jacob Zuma’s state seize challenge – and began our analysis. It took us on a exceptional and affirming journey.
We each got here from journalist backgrounds and shared a reasonably jaundiced view of public representatives. Each of our earlier, separate efforts at authoring books had centred on fairly unsavoury characters – in Jonathan’s case an apartheid spy and mine an unscrupulous businessman – and we anticipated Gordhan to a minimum of have some skeletons rattling round someplace, or perhaps toes of clay.
So, we nagged his private assistants within the public enterprises ministry till sooner or later he popped up on our screens for a zoom interview which he started with the query: “Okay, what’s your first query?”
Within the months that adopted, we spent a number of hours with him doing interviews. Throughout them, he sketched out his extraordinary life from pupil activist in Durban within the Seventies, to an underground activist for the ANC (when he was brutally tortured by the apartheid Safety Department), to an essential and influential participant within the multi-party negotiations that gave rise to a democratic South Africa, to turning the South African Income Service (Sars) right into a world-class organisation, and to turning into a cupboard minister. It was, after all, on this latter guise – in considered one of his two stints as finance minister – that Gordhan clashed with Zuma as he moved to dam varied state seize initiatives.
Throughout these interviews Gordhan by no means as soon as refused to reply a query or tried to affect what we might write. His openness and obvious honesty have been fairly distinctive.
We additionally interviewed many different individuals who have been both former comrades or had labored alongside him in authorities.
Irascible and impatient
A few of them pointed to what could be described as unfavourable character traits: he was extraordinarily demanding of his workers; he didn’t undergo fools gladly; he may very well be irascible and impatient.
However for each considered one of these there have been scores of optimistic feedback. A number of of the individuals who knew him effectively mentioned he was incorruptible. Some mentioned he was a grasp strategist, whereas others remarked on his ethical braveness and that he would all the time do the “proper factor”, whether or not or not it’s standing up towards apartheid or towards the corrupt tendencies of a few of his latter-day colleagues.
And what, we puzzled, drove this behaviour? Maybe the reply is greatest offered by the idea of a “greater function” which he used at Sars. The upper function, he would inform his workers, was to assemble sufficient tax cash to supply, say, faculties or respectable hospitals for individuals who had beforehand been denied them. In different phrases, Gordhan was pushed by serving the folks of South Africa.
Learn: Pravin Gordhan, who led combat towards state seize, has died
This, and the truth that Sars was taking up prison networks, made him unpopular within the corrupt circles which have been flourishing on the time. He grew to become the topic of an intense smear marketing campaign that seems to have been pushed by the intelligence neighborhood but in addition finally concerned many others, some unwittingly, akin to journalists from the Sunday Occasions who wrote a collection of damning however now discredited articles.
We had determined to not enterprise into his non-public life so do not know about that, however the overwhelming conclusion we reached was that we had uncovered that uncommon beast – an trustworthy politician.
There had been numerous smoke round him and we anticipated to search out hearth, however we didn’t. As an alternative, as we wrote on the time, “we discovered any person who’s devoted his whole life to the service of this nation and whose major motivation appears to be merely to make it a greater place for all of us”.
The one passage of his profession that’s now open to query is his stewardship of the general public enterprises ministry, the place he was charged with addressing the shortcomings of the state-owned enterprises (akin to Eskom, SAA, Transnet and Denel). Our analysis and writing was accomplished comparatively early in his time as minister of that portfolio, however we have been left with the impression that he had a plan and would flip them round regardless of the truth that they’d been central to the state seize challenge and have been all terribly hollowed-out.
An in depth confidante of Gordhan’s informed us on the time that the problem was made all of the tougher by two elements: the extent of the corruption inside these organisations, which was significantly higher than Gordhan and his lieutenants had anticipated; and the divisions within the ANC on the time, the place these related to state seize or loyal to Zuma would transfer to undermine Gordhan’s work at each flip.
Regardless of the case, it’s in all probability honest to recommend that he retired from the job earlier this 12 months with unfinished enterprise.
Throughout our interviews, Gordhan had steered he would proceed serving the ANC – to which he was nonetheless fiercely loyal – for so long as it wanted him. His retirement got here, due to this fact, as a shock. Maybe he was already struggling along with his well being or perhaps the numerous years of battle had lastly worn him down.
Learn: Gordhan undermined Eskom administration: De Ruyter
Regardless of the case, his contribution to South Africa has been immense, each as an anti-apartheid activist and in authorities. And he deserves to be remembered as that: a unprecedented and brave one that served the folks of this nation with nice distinction and made an actual distinction to their lives.
