Tito Mboweni has a way. He meanders, he circles. He reflects and talks colloquially about something in his personal experience. It’s difficult to know where he is going or where he stands.
And then he hits you with a very specific statement or decision.
The Mboweni way was very much on display at the traditional media conference before delivering the medium-term budget policy statement. He was grilled, for example, on what he would say if he were asked by the president how many people should be in his cabinet.
He meandered. He spoke about “belt tightening”, and how he would suggest things to the president while viewing cattle. The collective gathering could easily have thought he was well on his way to ducking the question, a technique not unknown to politicians.
But then he snapped into a direct response. “If he asks me about the size of the cabinet, I would say preferably not more than 25. China is a big economy, I think they have 25, or is it 35?
He delivered a long lecture about Swissair and how when it was not doing well over an extended period, it was closed down. ‘We have to be open-minded.’
“We have no politically understandable reason why we have an executive of up to 70. But it is a political question, which fortunately doesn’t reside with Treasury.”
It resides with the president, Mboweni said, and “that’s his problem. He raised his hand and said that he wanted to be president.”
The vacillation reflects Mboweni’s odd life trajectory in a way, with one foot in socialism and the other in business, rather like his boss, President Cyril Ramaphosa. His history encompasses both someone responsible for the management of the economy, and someone who is a former labour minister.
And quite often it is personal. For example, he wants to be called “governor”. Before the media conference started there was a discussion among journalists about how he would choose to be addressed. Unprompted, he said “minister” was “there” pointing to a level in front of him, and “governor” is “there”, pointing to a level somewhere higher.
And then he joked that he had been the eighth governor of the Reserve Bank, and that someone else was the 10th governor, referring to the incumbent, Lesetja Kganyago, who was sitting two seats to his left.
He also set out his stall as finance minister. “I thought one of the things I was going to do was to try to provide political protection to the national Treasury, and to the extent naively possible, to depoliticise the national Treasury.”
“I say naively possible because revenue allocation is highly political. But if we can protect the national Treasury from interference, we will try to do that. It’s near impossible, but we will try to do that.”
Consequently, prior to delivering the statement,Mboweni has held discussions with the other political parties and provincial premiers, with the intention of building partnerships.
And there was a touch of the businessman too. “I hope to move away from the previous notion that everything to do with extending basic services can only be done by the state, because it’s not true.”
His approach to government was also novel: “Since I still have a little bit of a honeymoon, I can talk about a framework that I don’t like. It is called ‘service delivery’. I think it’s bad.
“Service delivery is like sitting at home and waiting for the baker to deliver the bread … instead of participating in the development of the bread, which is development. I prefer the development approach not the delivery approach.”
And the stick was evident too. He delivered a long lecture about Swissair and how when it was not doing well over an extended period, it was closed down. “We have to be open-minded.”
The same headmaster-ish approach was apparent in his declaration that the user-pays principle must apply to things such as road tolls.
It’s not clear whether this politics of pedagogy can work or will work. But it is refreshing.
• Cohen is Business Day senior editor.
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