André Roux, who has died in London at the age of 68, was deputy director-general of the National Treasury and head of the budget office in the 1990s. He played a key role in formulating the post-apartheid government's macroeconomic strategy, the bold but fiercely contested Growth, Employment & Redistribution (GEAR) policy, which the government of Nelson Mandela adopted in 1996.
Intellectually formidable, Roux joined the department of finance — where he was responsible for macroeconomic, fiscal and tax policy and intergovernmental fiscal relations — with a BSc honours in mathematics from the University of Cape Town, an MPhil in economics from Cambridge and an MSc in mathematics from Oxford.
He also had behind him an academic career at Rhodes University during which he published on fiscal and development issues. After Rhodes he spent two years at the Development Bank of Southern Africa
The introduction of GEAR, which owed so much to his input and which he played such an important part in driving, together with finance minister Trevor Manuel, deputy minister Gill Marcus and director-general Maria Ramos, signalled a radically new macroeconomic framework prioritising fiscal restraint and reduction of the deficit.
Before this he'd had a hand in drawing up the white paper on the pivotal Reconstruction & Development Programme (RDP), with which the ANC entered government in 1994 and from which GEAR was a radical departure.
The introduction of GEAR signalled the ascendancy of a new institutional mandate with fiscal discipline, allocative efficiency and operational efficiency at its heart, with the Treasury, and in no small way Roux himself, at its helm. It represented the high-water mark of the Treasury’s power and the technical expertise and influence of its highly regarded deputy DG, to whom this new core mandate was sacred.
Roux believed that the hard-edged fiscal prudence he saw as imperative to South Africa's economic growth would be achieved through GEAR more successfully if co-ordinated by the Treasury, which at the time enjoyed the backing of the cabinet.
The introduction of GEAR saw a new emphasis on budgeting and evaluation processes as key elements in effective government expenditure management. Roux played an important role in establishing greater monitoring and accountability capacities through the development of critical performance indicators and a strong information management system.
For him the rise of GEAR represented the triumph of fiscal conservatism, which he believed was a must. It also highlighted for him the need for the effective co-ordination of economic policy at cabinet level.
He pushed for the pre-eminence of the Treasury in this process, which he believed was essential to its success. The result was that the Treasury came to represent the institutional embodiment of the macroeconomic paradigm enshrined in GEAR, which resulted in it attracting the same harsh criticism unleashed on GEAR by the ANC’s alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu. Roux, as a senior Treasury official closely associated with GEAR, was not immune to this.
Thabo Mbeki’s public defence of GEAR, which provoked his detractors to call him a “Thatcherite”, helped affirm the Treasury’s ascendance in the emerging hierarchy of post-apartheid governance.
Roux believed in a strong, centralised Treasury and the pivotal role of a technocratic elite, and worked hard to this end. The authority of the Treasury and the macroeconomic stance it spearheaded were criticised throughout Mbeki’s presidency.
Thabo Mbeki’s public defence of GEAR, which provoked his detractors to call him a 'Thatcherite', helped affirm the Treasury’s ascendance in the emerging hierarchy of post-apartheid governance
GEAR, as Roux helped shape it, broadly accorded with global economic prescripts and made overtures to international markets, seeking to attract the foreign direct investment he believed was indispensable to South Africa's chances of economic growth and effective redistribution, which for him was always key.
He was keenly sensitive to the fact that South Africa’s re-emergence into the international economic community was subject to the scrutiny of global financial markets that punished deficit financing and rewarded fiscal restraint, and GEAR strongly reflected this.
But he was one of the key figures in the Treasury who refuted the claim by opponents of GEAR that it was drawn up by and imposed on South Africa by the World Bank and IMF at the cost of the country’s economic sovereignty.
On the contrary, he said, the GEAR strategy was about maintaining South Africa’s economic sovereignty. He pointed to other developing nations that had followed the expansive spending programmes advocated by GEAR's opponents and had then been forced to borrow from international lenders with stringent conditions attached.
In 1999 he was persuaded to join Investec Asset Management, now Ninety One, where he played a key role in building its fixed income business in South Africa and Asia.
Born on January 18 1954 Roux grew up in Grahamstown where he was detained in the 80s for anti-apartheid activism. He had lived in Singapore since 2014, where he was Ninety One’s fixed income portfolio manager.
He died after a short illness while on a business trip to London. He is survived by his second wife, Rebecca, two children and two stepchildren.
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