From construction worker to Finance Minister
Trevor Manuel was the last South African Finance Minister to run a full budget surplus in the 2007/08 financial year after a decade of fixing the government’s finances.
Manuel served as Finance Minister for thirteen years under three different presidents, tasked with reviving the South African economy and stabilising the government’s finances.
Before South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, its economy stagnated, with economic growth averaging 0.2% between 1990 and the election.
The country was also facing increasingly strict international trade embargoes and boycotts, crippling its ability to import oil and other vital commodities.
As a result, South Africa was battling rising debt and a weakening currency. In other words, the country was heading for bankruptcy and needed urgent economic and political reforms.
Reforms during the Mandela and Mbeki administrations, spearheaded by Manuel as Finance Minister, turned the country around.
These two administrations averaged annual economic growth of 2.7% and 4.1%, respectively, while running consecutive budget surpluses under Mbeki, greatly improving South Africa’s credit rating.
As with many of the government officials of the time, Manuel had his roots in anti-Apartheid activism as general secretary of the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee and regional secretary of the United Democratic Fund (UDF).
Born in Cape Town in 1956, Manuel was raised in the Mother City and trained as a construction technician at the Cape Peninsula Technikon after matriculating from Harold Cressy High School in District Six.
After being initially attracted to the Black Consciousness Movement, Manuel travelled to Botswana in 1979 to join the ANC in exile. The ANC sent him back to Cape Town to lead its activism in the province through the UDF.
Manuel became a full-time political activist in 1981 as general secretary of the Cape Areas Housing Action Committee.
He also had a history of starting community newspapers such as Kenfacs and Grassroots. Manuel also organised bus boycotts in the Western Cape as part of a youth movement.
Due to his organisational skills, Manuel quickly rose through the ranks. In 1983, he became the regional secretary of the UDF and a member of its national executive.
Manuel first established his economic prowess as head of the ANC’s internal Department of Economic Planning during the negotiations to end Apartheid from 1991 to 1994.
Becoming Finance Minister

Manuel enjoyed a rapid rise through the ANC’s ranks after only being formally elected to a full-time office in the party in 1991.
His immense work as head of the ANC’s Department of Economic Planning landed him the role of South Africa’s first Minister of Trade and Industry in the democratic era.
Manuel would only serve in this role for two years before Mandela believed his skills were needed to rectify South Africa’s financial mess in 1996.
During his short time as Trade Minister, Manuel championed South Africa’s economic liberalisation, pushing for the government to embrace free market principles.
This ensured he was sharply criticised by the ANC’s fellow members of the Tripartite Alliance – the Communist Party and COSATU – as a neoliberal. Others described Manuel as a pragmatist.
At the time, Manuel said his priorities would be “to open up our domestic market to international competition”, thus reversing the isolation of the apartheid era.
Manuel transformed the ministry. Observers at the time said his greatest achievement “was to take a department whose sole raison d’être under apartheid was to stifle competition and make it the vanguard of a ‘liberalised’ market economy”.
This made him very unpopular with trade unions.
As it turned out, Manuel’s ideas were precisely the right ones that South Africa needed at the time. With the country headed for bankruptcy, it had to cut state spending and boost economic growth.
“The ANC in its first decade in power does much better at restoring economic stability and raising living standards than it was ever given credit for,” the head of the Social Research Foundation, Dr Frans Cronje, said.
“You will continue to read, including in the business press, that the ANC has presided over an era of service delivery failure, which is plainly wrong on its facts.”
Cronje said the basic living standards of many South Africans increased significantly and rapidly during the first decade of ANC rule.

During Mandela’s administration, the economy averaged an annual growth rate of 2.7%, and government spending gradually reduced while its debt pile stabilised.
This laid the foundation for an economic revival during the Mbeki administration, with Manuel being instrumental in forming the market-friendly Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy during the Mandela years.
GEAR marked a shift from the state-centric economic policy of prior administrations to instead focus on improving government efficiency, limiting spending growth, and creating the conditions for private companies to invest in South Africa.
Manuel was sharply criticised by trade unions for this policy framework, which explicitly targeted reducing the budget deficit to 3%, eliminating tariffs as far as possible, and limiting the growth of the public sector wage bill.
Economic growth surged to an average annual rate of 4.1% during the Mbeki administration. Under Manuel, the government recorded its first-ever budget surplus in the 2006/2007 financial year.
Manuel, who was long regarded as a pragmatist, said in 2013 that he still had little technical knowledge of economics.
“But, I knew that if I set this thing up where people can come with the numbers, and I ask the questions based on life experience and understanding and broad political objectives, then it will work.”
He also had a significant international profile, holding positions at the United Nations Commission for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the G20.
Manuel also won Africa’s Finance Minister of the Year Award and the Woodrow Wilson Public Service Award for his work.
Life after government

However, much of Manuel’s hard work was undone when Pravin Gordhan replaced him as Finance Minister when Jacob Zuma ascended to the presidency.
The 2007/08 financial year’s budget surplus was the last full budget surplus until the present day, with the current government only reporting primary budget surpluses, which exclude debt-servicing costs.
After Manuel left office, government spending skyrocketed without much benefit to economic growth, as much of it was consumption-based and not focused on enhancing the economy’s productivity.
In 2008/09, gross loan debt amounted to R627 billion or 26% of GDP, with net loan debt at R526 billion or 21.8% of GDP.
The most recent government budget shows that its gross loan debt was R5.7 trillion, or 76.1% of GDP. This comes at a time when the country’s economy has averaged an annual growth rate of 0.8% for the past decade.
From 2009 to 2014, Manuel was moved to Minister in the Presidency responsible for long-term strategic planning through the National Planning Commission.
During the period, Manuel led the team that came up with the fiercely-contested National Development Plan, which was adopted in 2012.
In the same year, Manuel ended his 21-year tenure on the ANC’s National Executive Committee and announced his retirement from politics in 2014.
Manuel’s retirement from politics freed him up to pursue his interest in private business, being appointed as senior adviser to the Rothschild Group in late 2014.
In March 2017, he would replace Bruce Hemphill as chairman of Old Mutual Emerging Markets while holding various non-executive directorships.
This did not mean that Manuel had no political sway, with him sharply criticising President Zuma throughout the 2010s and calling for him to step aside in 2016.
In 2022, Manuel allowed his ANC membership to lapse, saying that, in retrospect, “the magic, the stance of moral leadership that had shaped the ANC throughout my youth, was gone.”
He would serve his country again as part of the panel to appoint a new SARS Commissioner in 2019 and as one of President Ramaphosa’s four investment envoys.
Manuel is currently the Chairman of Old Mutual and serves on the boards of Old Mutual plc and Old Mutual Emerging Markets.
He also serves as a non-executive director on the board of SwissRe, one of the world’s largest reinsurers.
Manuel is still a senior advisor to and the chairperson of the Rothschild Group and serves as a trustee of the Allan Gray Orbis Endowment Trust. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Centre for African Cities at UCT.
He currently has eight honorary doctorates from South African tertiary institutions in a range of disciplines, including Commerce, Law, and Technology, and a Doctor of Laws from MacMaster University, Ontario, Canada.
He has been an Honorary Professor in the School of Development Policy & Practice at UCT since 2015, where he is a Senior Political Fellow, and as Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Johannesburg since 2014.
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